Keres

The Keres are the Pueblo people of seven towns along the Rio Grande and its western tributaries in New Mexico, among them the mesa towns of Acoma and Laguna. Archaeology and Cochiti oral tradition suggest they entered the Rio Grande drainage from the west in the early 1300s.

Acoma had been inhabited for over a thousand years when Estevanico visited in 1539. In 1599 Juan de Oñate's troops sacked it, killing some 800 people and enslaving hundreds more. The Keres joined the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, after which refugees from Acoma and other rebel towns founded Laguna. Through the eighteenth century they kept their clans and kiva rituals under an outward Catholicism, fending off Apache, Comanche and Ute raids.