What area did the pueblo and Navajo people settled in?

The Navajo people live in an area between the boundaries marked by the four sacred mountains and centered around the two central scared mountains. This older central part in just south of where the emergence place is said to be and is sometimes called Dine' Tah. These boundary mountains make a diamond shape in north eastern Arizona, north western New Mexico, southern Colorado and southern Utah. It is the high Colorado Plateau, Four Corners region. The four mountains are, always starting in the east, Mt Blanca, Mt Taylor, San Fransisco Peaks and Mt Hesperus.

Both the old oral history and religious stories and the modern archeology say that this area south of the La Plata mountains in the lower San Juan river valley in northern New Mexico is where people recognizable as Navajo (as opposed to other Apache related groups) first appeared about 900-1100 years ago.

Today the Navajo Nation occupies 27,000 square miles in the western and central portion of this region. This is about the size of Holland and Belgium put together. There are 300,000 tribal members.

There are today 21 different Pueblo people. They speak 8 different languages in four different language families (depending on how you count a language vs a dialect). They are also often grouped in 2 different broad culture groups based on similarity of structure and creation myths. The majority are along the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico. The rest are the Hopi (and Tewa at Hano) at the Hopi Mesas in Arizona , Zuni, Acoma and Laguna in western New Mexico. They all have lived in more or less the same places for 700 to 1100 years depending on the tribe. Some have been there since Anasazi times others migrated to where they are now between 1200-1300 AD as the Anasazi culture changed to modern Pueblo. All of the Pueblo people have creation stories that include a migration phase and most have stories of the emergence up from worlds before this one (as do the Navajo). Some have stories of specific clans that came from specific Anasazi sites. Today there are about 35,000

• 40,000 Pueblo people in Arizona and New Mexico.