An Archaeologist Said the Acoma Story Was False — Then They Climbed the Mesa Again

In 1897, Princeton professor William Libbey climbed K’atzimo — Enchanted Mesa — to test an Acoma tradition that ancestors had once lived on its summit. He came down claiming the story had failed the test of investigation. Then Frederick Webb Hodge climbed the mesa again and found pottery, stone tools and other evidence of human presence. But the real question is harder than “who was right”: do those finds prove that an entire Acoma pueblo once stood on the summit, or only that people repeatedly used the place? This episode follows the original 1897 controversy, the archaeology, and the limits of what the surviving evidence can actually prove. Sources: 1. Pueblo of Acoma https://www.puebloofacoma.org/ 2. jstor.org https://www.jstor.org/stable/1622829 3. Google Books — Frederick Webb Hodge The Enchanted Mesa https://play.google.com/store/books/d... 4. Project Gutenberg — Pg16025 images https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/...