Acoma Pueblo in the context of "Pueblos"

Pueblo refers to the settlements of the Pueblo peoples, Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, currently in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. The permanent communities, including some of the oldest continually occupied settlements in the United States, are called pueblos (lowercased).

Spanish explorers of northern New Spain used the term pueblo to refer to permanent Indigenous towns they found in the region, mainly in New Mexico and parts of Arizona, in the former province of Nuevo México. This term continued to be used to describe the communities housed in apartment structures built of stone, adobe, and other local material. The structures were usually multistoried buildings surrounding an open plaza. Many rooms were accessible only through ladders raised and lowered by the inhabitants, thus protecting them from break-ins and unwanted guests. Larger pueblos are occupied by hundreds to thousands of Puebloan people.

The Pueblo peoples or Puebloans are Native Americans in the Southwestern United States who share common agricultural, material, and religious practices. Among the currently inhabited pueblos, Taos, San Ildefonso, Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi are some of the most commonly known. Pueblo people speak languages from four different language families, and each pueblo is further divided culturally by kinship systems and agricultural practices, although all cultivate varieties of corn (maize).

Pueblo peoples have lived in the American Southwest for millennia and descend from the Ancestral Pueblo peoples. The term Anasazi is sometimes used to refer to Ancestral Puebloan. "Anasazi" is a Navajo adoption of a Ute term that translates to Ancient Enemy or Primitive Enemy, but was used by them to mean something like "barbarian" or "savage", hence the modern Pueblo peoples' rejection of it (see exonym).

The Zuni (Zuni: A:shiwi; formerly spelled Zuñi) are Native American Pueblo peoples native to the Zuni River valley. The Zuni people today are federally recognized as the Zuni Tribe of the Zuni Reservation, New Mexico, and most live in the Pueblo of Zuni on the Zuni River, a tributary of the Little Colorado River, in western New Mexico, United States. The Pueblo of Zuni is 55 km (34 mi) south of Gallup, New Mexico. Traditional Zuni homes in the Pueblo are multi level adobe houses. In addition to the reservation, the tribe owns trust lands in Catron County, New Mexico, and Apache County, Arizona. The Zuni call their homeland Halona Idiwan’a or Middle Place. The word Zuni is believed to derive from the Western Keres language (Acoma) word sɨ̂‧ni, or a cognate thereof.