The Spaniards coming north from Mexico found the Pueblos a backward people relatively to the Nahuas and the Mayas, but leading a peaceful, agricultural existence just as they had done for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years, and having developed at the same time a culture of many sorts that suited their needs and satisfied their hearts. This culture included an architecture ranking high among “Pueblo Arts” and characteristic of the mesa country which produced it, where building-material was to be had for the taking. One form of expression of their art is found in the pictographs on the cliffs and _kiva_ walls intended to communicate a kinship of ideas between tribes who could not understand each other’s speech. It is not believed that these pictographs were at all like the ideographs of the Central American peoples. They generally delineate natural objects, most often animals, and while they may sometimes record events, like a victory in war, or indicate the special shrine of the antelope or the serpent, they are for the most part thought to be merely the beginnings of pictorial art characteristic of all children and of races in their childhood. The archaeologists and ethnologists have thus far gathered so few positive data about the Ácomas that their racial origin is still wrapped in mysterious and romantic legend. But so much as this is agreed upon: the Ácomas are a people of one race, the Keresan,[122] composed of many clans, some of them related to those who settled in the Tusayán region.[123] They entered this great valley from the Gila, and form the most eastern group of its influence and seem from the very first to have been in continual conflict with other peoples. They were apparently at once attacked and forced to defend themselves, and forthwith chose the most inaccessible rock they could find, whereon to build an impregnable fortress-city from which other tribes could not dislodge them. Cosmos Mindeleff considers Ácoma’s position on a mesa summit unusual, and thinks it due to the fact that, “like the wilder tribes, its people were predatory upon their neighbors.”[124] The actual date when the Pueblo of Ácoma began its life upon its fortress-rock we shall probably never know, but all are agreed that it was very ancient in Coronado’s time (1540).