Native Americans, whose ancestors crossed from Asia to North America more than twenty thousand years ago, were already settled throughout North, Central, and South America at the time the Europeans first arrived in the Western Hemisphere. A heartline is a decorative motif originating in the mid-nineteenth century in the American Southwest. Frequently animal figures on pottery and stone carvings are depicted with a line from the mouth to the chest, terminating in an arrowhead at the heart. This heartline represents the spirit or life of the animal. For ceremonial purposes, men wear masks and regalia appropriate for specific kachinas.
Members use the room when they come together to talk, work, and conduct religious ceremonies.
Many of the nonpublic religious ceremonies of Pueblo peoples are held in kivas. The ancestors of the Pueblo people were hunters and gatherers. During the third millennium B.C. , the nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors of modern Pueblo Indians added domesticated corn to their diet, which allowed them to establish farming communities along the Rio Grande and other fertile areas in the Southwest. Menu Mesa A mesa is a flat-topped mountain or hill common throughout the Southwest. Spanish explorers called these geographic features mesas , which means table in Spanish, because they resemble tables with smooth, flat tops, and sides that drop away steeply.