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.
Indigenous peoples in Ecuador
Using the system of multicyclic agriculture, which allowed them to have year-long harvests of a wide variety of crops by planting at a variety of altitudes and at different times, the Sierra people flourished. Generally, an ethnic group farmed the mountainside nearest to it. Cities began to specialize in the production of goods, agricultural and otherwise. For this reason, the dry valleys, where cotton, coca, "ají" (chili peppers), indigo, and fruits could be grown and where salt could be produced, gained economic importance. Sometimes, tribes farmed lands outside their immediate purview. These goods were then traded in a two-tiered market system.