During the severely low temperatures this past February, I began to wonder how the Pueblo Indians long ago managed to get by when they experienced even harsher conditions. A little investigation on my part turned up some answers.

A time or two in this column, I have written about what scientists now call the "Little Ice Age" that blanketed New Mexico and upper North America during the entire colonial period. But here, I want to focus on specific ways that the Pueblo people responded to these prolonged weather crises.

The best sources of information come from 16th- and 17th-century Spanish chroniclers. They left us valuable comments on the bitter cold that beset the New Mexico province.

The first question that comes to mind is: How effective were the multi-storied adobe dwellings of the Indians in providing shelter from the pervasive cold?

With an abundance of fuel, the small apartments in a pueblo could have been made bearable. However, after generations of residents had drawn upon local resources, the land round-about a village tended to be stripped of trees and woody shrubs.

That meant extended hikes to distant areas for firewood. Lacking draft animals and carts, the Pueblos were obliged to carry home the harvested wood on their backs. The early Spanish colonists relieved that burden by making available donkeys and ox carts.

When all else failed, the Indians used for emergency fuel the dried cornstalks left in their fields from the previous harvest. The first Spanish explorers, unaware of that, would turn their horses into those fields to graze on the stalks, causing much resentment among their hosts.

The relatively short sub-zero interval with gas outages that we endured in February was just a small hint of what the Pueblo people were forced to contend with annually.

In 1634, Fray Alonso de Benavides reported that snow lingered on the ground for months and was the cause of intolerable cold. "It is so intense," he wrote, "that between November and February all the rivers, both large and small, are frozen over solid."

Under those conditions, the Pueblo people were in the habit of retreating into their kivas, or semi-subterranean religious chambers, seeking warmth there.

In 1591, Gaspar Castaño de Sosa at Pecos was very specific on that point. As he declared, "In this pueblo are 16 estufas, all underground and very large, which were made for use in cold spells that are great in this country."

Estufa, meaning either a stove or a warming room, was the Spaniard's term for what we now refer to as a kiva. In the 1890s, anthropologists working in northern Arizona borrowed the Hopi name, kiva, and it soon displaced estufa.

In any case, for centuries the Pueblo population would seek refuge in their estufas whenever winter's cold became unbearable.

When everyone was packed inside, huddled together, body heat did much to warm the air. Added to that, a single fire that burned wood, brush, corncobs or cornstalks contributed to the comfort level.

The Pueblos, as their resources allowed, dressed for the cruel weather. Garments made of soft buckskin provided better protection from icy blasts than those made of native cotton cloth.

With introduction of Spanish sheep, wool clothing became accessible. And from the Plains Indians, dwellers in adobe towns traded for heavy buffalo robes that shed the extreme cold far better than their own lightweight cotton mantas (blankets).

Still, by all accounts, the Pueblo Indians as well as Spanish settlers seem to have suffered terribly from the polar-like winters. Father Benavides testifies that every year people were found frozen to death.

Those baleful times, though, can remind us how lucky we are to live in an age when weather, on the whole, treats us far more charitably!

Historian Marc Simmons is author of numerous books on New Mexico and the Southwest. His column appears Saturdays.