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.

[1] The structures were usually multi-storied buildings surrounding an open plaza, with rooms accessible only through ladders raised and lowered by the inhabitants, thus protecting them from break-ins and unwanted guests.

[2] In the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, specifically in the region between Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos, the word "pueblo" defines a "distinct cultural group in the Southwestern United States" and their villages.

[5][6] On the central Spanish Meseta the unit of settlement was and is the pueblo; which is to say, the large nucleated village surrounded by its own fields, with no outlying farms, separated from its neighbors by some considerable distance, sometimes as much as ten miles [16 km] or so.

The demands of agrarian routine and the need for defense, the simple desire for human society in the vast solitude of (rocky plains, or the desert), dictated that it should be so.

Some of the pueblos also came under the jurisdiction of the United States, in its view, by its treaty with Mexico, which had briefly gained rule over territory in the Southwest ceded by Spain after Mexican independence.

[10] Cochiti, Jemez, Sandia, Santa Ana, and Zia are served by the Five Sandoval Indian Pueblos, a nonprofit organization based in Rio Rancho.

For example, the National Park Service states, "The Late Puebloan cultures built the large, integrated villages found by the Spaniards when they began to move into the area.

Others are of prehistoric origin, such as the cliff dwellings and other habitations of the Ancestral Puebloans, who emerged as a people around the 12th century BCE and began to construct their pueblos about 750–900 CE.