"Scott Ortman is standing among the ruins of Arroyo Hondo Pueblo south of Santa Fe, explaining how the bits of broken pottery collected here aren't just pretty relics of days gone by — they're clues suggesting that people came here 700 years ago looking for a change and an escape from the status quo.

"You need to look at the patterns of material culture" — the way a jar is painted, the way a village is constructed, and how these differ from place to place — "as reflecting political life," says Ortman, one of the Santa Fe Institute's eight Omidyar Fellows. To him, the material culture of Northern New Mexico pueblos reflects a level of social turmoil we usually associate with military powers and modern societies, not the subsistence farmers who occupied the Rio Grande Valley 700 years ago.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The question that got Ortman started and that brought us to Arroyo Hondo one day in March is this: Where did the Tewa people living in the area north of Santa Fe come from, and how — and why — did they get there?

What archaeologists agree on is that the population in Northern New Mexico exploded in the late 13th century, right around the time the population at the Mesa Verde area in the Four Corners region collapsed. But they also can show that the material cultures of Four Corners and Northern New Mexico were markedly different, meaning that people from Four Corners didn't just pick up and move to Tesuque. There's a mystery here. If people did migrate south, what happened to their culture? And if they didn't, what caused the population explosion in New Mexico?"

Get the Story:
Nathan Collins: Tewa sought life of equality in N.M. (The Santa Fe New Mexican 3/28)