Antonio de Espejo
In February 1583, Espejo arrived at the territory of the Piros, the most southerly of the Pueblo villagers. From there the Spanish continued up the Rio Grande. Espejo described the Pueblo villages as "clean and tidy". The houses were multi-storied and made of adode bricks. "They make very fine tortillas," Espejo commented, and the Pueblos also served the Spanish turkeys, beans, corns, and pumpkins. The people "did not seem to be bellicose". The southernmost Pueblos had only clubs for weapons plus a few "poor Turkish bows and poorer arrows". Further north, the Indians were better armed and more aggressive. Some of the Pueblo towns were large, Espejo described Zia as having 1,000 houses and 4,000 men and boys. In their farming, the Pueblos used irrigation "with canals and dams, built as if by Spaniards". The only Spanish influence that Espejo noted among the Pueblos was their desire for iron. They would steal any iron article they could find.
Sirikwa people
The Chok were committed grain cultivators living along the Kerio escarpment. They depended on rain to grow eleusine grain high up on the hill sides and developed a large network of irrigation canals to grow "millet on the fertile and well watered flats at the base of the Elgeyo escarpment. The irrigation system as Beech noted in 1911, "is most ingenious, and its original construction must have required a vast amount of toil and patience".