Uncovering America’s First War is the definitive study of one of the most important places in the US Southwest: the ancestral Tiwa village of Piedras Marcadas Pueblo.
by: Matthew F. Schmader
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Publication date: April 1, 2025
Language: English
Hardcover: 376 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8263-6793-8
Chronicling Schmader’s decades of exhaustive research, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in New Mexican history, the Coronado expedition, and Pueblo negotiations of early colonialism.”—Matthew Liebmann, author of Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico.
By the 1530s, Indigenous Pueblo populations in the American Southwest reached tens of thousands of people with a rich culture expressed through stunning architecture, ceramic technology, and ceremonial life. Then, into that world came outsiders—an army from Spain’s new colony in Mexico led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. First contacts at the western Pueblos of Zuni, Hopi, and Acoma led to open warfare.
By the winter of 1540, increasing tensions and resistance spilled over into violence in America’s earliest named war, the Tiguex War, which occurred in an area settled by ancestors of today’s Rio Grande Pueblos. The largest and most intact battle site of that fierce conflict is known as Piedras Marcadas Pueblo, situated within present-day Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fighting back against Coronado’s crossbows and muskets with stone-tipped arrows and sling stones, the Puebloans mounted a courageous defense of their largest village, piling rocks on rooftops and hurling them down at attackers. Hundreds of artifacts found at Piedras Marcadas reveal the life-and-death contest for survival that occurred within those ancient walls and plazas. and plazas that are now silent but were once the focal point of a life-and-death contest for survival.
