Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/353

 OLD INDIAN GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES AROUND SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

BY J. P. HARRINGTON.

SEVERAL years ago the writer undertook, at the suggestion of Dr. Hewett, to collect the old Indian place names of the region about Santa Fe, New Mexico. Several hundred names of places were obtained by interviewing Indian and Spanish-speaking inhabitants and many of the localities were actually visited in com- pany with one or more of the informants. 1 The present paper discusses in concise form the most important of these place names. Besides being of great local interest to the people of New Mexico, the place names throw certain light on the archaeology of the region and also on the subject of primitive geographical nomenclature in general.

ABIQUIU [3:36].

The original Tewa designation of this quaint Mexican town, which lies on the west bank of the Chama river eighteen miles above its confluence with the Rio Grande, is Phesu'u, literally "timber point" (phe, stick of wood, timber; su'u, point of land, projecting point of hill or mesa, horizontally projecting end or point of any long object). What the name means is perfectly clear, yet why it was originally applied no Tewa knows. Either a former point of land with timber on it or a single projecting stick of timber was doubtless the originating landmark. The early Mexican colonists promptly corrupted Phesu'u into Abiquiu, the pronuncia- tion of which does not differ as widely from the Tewa form as Spanish orthography might suggest. The present town stands almost on the site of the ancient pueblo, the Indian population of which gradually became Mexicanized and blended with the Mexican

1 The results are published in the writer's paper entitled " The Ethnogeography of the Tewa Indians," Twenty-ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, 1916, to which the reference numbers in brackets, given in the present paper, refer.

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