Brief History of Pueblo Weavings

The sixteenth-century Spaniards, entering the region we know today as the American Southwest, found the natives of the land living in compact villages, or pueblos, of stone-walled or mud-walled houses.  These Indians practiced intensive agriculture, had a complex socioreligious system, and were skilled in many crafts, especially pottery making, basketry, and weaving.  Spanish reports suggest that there were at least seventy villages in the mid-1500s (Schroeder 1979:236-54).  The contemporary Pueblo Indians, descendants of these earlier people, live in thirty-one villages: nineteen in New Mexico and twelve in the Hopi country of northeastern Arizona.

The Spaniards noted especially that the Indians they encountered from the vicinity of present-day El Paso northward were well clothed in cotton textiles, in marked contrast to the generally naked peoples they had previously met in their march north from the Valley of Mexico.  Spanish accounts express astonishment at the beauty and quantity of the fabrics worn by the people and offered as gifts.  They mention embroidered and painted shirts, mantas or shawls, sashes, and kilts or breechcloths, though they give little precise information about technical processes or design styles.  Luxan, on the occasion of Antonio de Espejo's visit to Awatovi in 1583, recorded: "Hardly had we pitched camp when about one thousand Indians came laden with maize, ears of green corn, pinole, tamales, and firewood, and they offered it all, together with six hundred widths of blankets small and large, white and painted, so that it was a pleasant sight to behold" (Hammond and Rey 1929:98).

We know that the kinds of textiles seen by the Spaniards had been made and used by southwestern people for hundreds of years (Kent 1957, 1983).  Our evidence consists of some 3,000 textile fragments and  a few complete fabrics from archaeological sites dating mostly between A.D. 1000 and 1400, and of costumes depicted in the fifteenth-century Pueblo murals of Kuaua, Awatovi, Kawaika-a, and Pottery Mound (Dutton 1963, Hibbgen 1975, Smith 1952).  The oldest examples of Anasazi, or prehistoric Pueblo, textiles, dated between A.D. 200 and 600, were made by finger techniques from wild plant and animal fibers.  Cotton, which was introduced into southern Arizona between A.D. 100 and 600, appears in a few of these Anasazi textiles shortly before 700.  Loom-woven cotton fabrics have been found in a few northern sites dated between 700 and 1000, but the first clear evidence for the cultivation of cotton north of the Mogollon Rim dates after A.D. 1000.

In addition to using native-grown cotton, early Pueblo weavers worked with apocynum (Indian hemp), yucca leaf fiber, fur, and feather cord.  Tools found in many of the prehistoric sites indicate that cotton was spun with the same type of stick-and-whorl spindle still in use today.  The resulting yarn was fashioned by finger processed into socks, bags, nets, and braids or was woven into cloth on a wide upright loom or a backstrap loom.  Weaving on the loom was a man's art and continued to be so until recently.  Anasazi weavers knew a limited range of natural dyes, including brick red, brown, black, yellow, and pale blue.

At the time of their arrival, the Spaniards found cotton growing at pueblos in the Rio Grande Valley as far north as the mouth of the Chama River, at Acoma, and at Hopi to the west (Jones 1926).   Spanish accounts are unclear about whether the plant was grown at Zuni, although Fray Marcos de Niza in 1539 spoke of Zuni houses that were full of cotton cloth (Riley 1975:139).  Judging from the historical accounts, it is probably safe to assume that some of this cloth was woven at Zuni but most was obtained from the Hopi villages, where cotton was grown in great quantities to supply a thriving industry that produced textiles both for domestic use and for export., Luxan, for example, described in 1583 a march of two leagues, one of them through cotton fields" between the first and second Hopi mesas (Hammond and Rey 1929:101).

During the sixteen century, the Zuni towns sat at the crossroads of major trade routes running to the south and southwest, northwest toward the Hopi country, and north and east to the Rio Grande Valley, Pecos Pueblos, and the southern Great Plains.  Cotton cloth was surly important among the goods carried along these routes.  Trade goods passing through Zuni and other pueblos included turquoise from New Mexico, shell and coral from Gulf of California and the Pacific, parrot and macaw feathers from Mexico, worked hides from the Great Plains, salt and semiprecious stones from various localities, and blankets from Hopi.

The Indian Leaflet Series of the Denver Art Museum, written b y the late Frederic H. Douglas between 1930 and 1940, remains a basic source of information about the textiles of the Rio Grande Pueblos, Acoma, Laguna, and Zuni.  Leslie Spier's 19724 paper adds substantially to the information on waving at Zuni at the turn of the century.  There is a bit more information in print for the Hopis (See Colton 1938 and 1965), Douglas 1938, Hough 1918, Kent 1940, Stephen 1936, Whiting 1977, and Wright 1979), but our knowledge of the history and use of some textiles remains incomplete.

There is a good reason for the general lack of public knowledge about, and interest in, Pueblo textiles.  Quite simply, they were woven not for tourist sale but to meet the needs of an internal market.  Except for a few forms such as belts, sashes, and certain contemporary embroideries, they have not proved usable by Anglo buyers.  The modest number of blankets and rugs woven for external markets has never commanded the attention that has been given to Navajo textiles (Kent 1976).

The history of Pueblo textiles since the arrival of the Spaniards in 1540 is best considered in four time periods: the period of Spanish domination, 1540 - 1848; the "classic" period of historic Pueblo weaving, 1848 - 1880; the period of growing Anglo-American influence and the decline of weaving, 1880 - 1920; and the revival of certain forms of Pueblo textiles that led to the contemporary picture, 1920 - 1950.

Navajo Weavings

Navajo weaving has captured the imagination of many enthusiasts, not only for its aesthetic qualities - its variety of design and general excellence of technique - but also because its stylistic changes through time to faithfully mirror the social, economic, and political history of the Navajo people.  It is as though the women wove their life experiences into their textiles, giving us insights into their changing world.

Navajos say they learned to weave from Spider Woman on a loom constructed according to directions given them by Spider Man.  A more mundane view is that weaving as practiced by the Navajos is an eclectic art, learned from the Pueblo Indians in the mid-seventeenth century and reflecting both Pueblo and Spanish clothing styles and design preferences for the next 150 years.  By the late 1700s, commercial European and Mexican trade cloth, which could be raveled for red yarns, modified the appearance of some Navajo textiles; and a few decades later, variously colored commercial yarns and strong Mexican influence in the form of the Saltillo design style changed them still further.  Since about 1850, the major agent of change has been Anglo-Americans, who not only introduced bright aniline dyes but also, by furnishing ready-made clothing and commercial cloth, lessened the Navajos' need for their own loom products and turned the weavers towards an off-reservation market.  Shortly before 1900, Anglo-American fostered radically new design motifs to be used on rugs rather than traditional blankets.

Navajo weavings may be classified for descriptive purposes under three major stylistic periods: the Classic, 1650 to 1865; the Transition, 1865 to 1895; and the Rug, 1895 to the present.  These terms ere first proposed by Charles A. Amsden in 1934; I have modified his opening and closing dates in some cases so that they correlate with significant historical events affecting the Navajo people.

Throughout the Classic period, Navajo weavers directed much of their time and energy toward producing clothing for their own people.  They wove woolen articles very similar to those that the Pueblo Indians had designed and made of cotton long before the coming of the Spaniards.  Outstanding among these were mantas-rectangular blankets wider, measured along the wefts, than they are long-which were worn as wraparound dresses by women and as shoulder robes by both sexes.  The Navajos also made tuniclike shirts, breechcloths, harrow hair ties, and garters for men, and warp-patterned belts for both men and women.  By 1700, Navajos as well as Pueblos were probably weaving wool serapes, or Spanish-style blankets longer, measured along the warps, than they are wide.  The shape, the use of wool yarns and indigo dye, and probably the common pattern of simple stripes all resulted from Spanish influence.

Surplus products of the Navajo loom, particularly mantas and serapes, gained increasing importance in trade with Pueblos, other Indians, and Spaniards from 1700 to the late 1800s.  With the opening of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821, the market for Navajo blankets expanded still further to include Anglo-Americans.  In the last years of the nineteenth century (that is, during the Transition period), the Navajos wove less clothing for themselves and more blankets and serapes for trade with their traditional customers and Anglos as well.  With the conversion of blankets to rugs just before 1900, weaving became essentially market oriented, though saddle blankets were, and still are, made for local consumption.

There has never been a time in the long history of Navajo weaving when the artists were not aware of the needs of the marketplace nor failed to modify their work to some extent to suit the tastes of potential buyers.  This flexibility, coupled with the introduction of design ideas from other cultures and of new dyes and commercial yarns in a range of colors unknown to weavers of the eighteenth century, inevitably changed the appearance of Navajo textiles.  Contemporary rugs bear little or no visual resemblance to textiles of the Classic period, and we may not be able to find single set of aesthetic principles expressed in all the various historical styles.  The evolution of Navajo textile design cannot be understood, however, simply as a function of the myriad influences brought to bear on weavers over the centuries.  It is the creative ways in which new ideas and materials were handled that will engage our attention.  Navajo weavers struck a balance between eclecticism and originality.

The origin and evolution of Navajo weaving from about 1650 to the early 1980s, as recounted here, is quite well documented, but the story has by no means ended.  Change continues as weavers experiment with new materials and new combinations of design motifs.  Undoubtedly the principal motivation for the perseverance of weaving is monetary return, but the art is also cherished, as it might well be, by many Navajo as a distinguished product of their traditional culture.

Source: Pueblo Indian Textiles, A Living Tradition, by Kate Peck Kent, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Source: Navajo Weaving, Three Centuries of Change, by Kate Peck Kent, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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