Quarai was a seventeenth-century Tiwa town where about 600 southern Tiwa people hunted, farmed, and traded goods and salt gathered from nearby lakebeds in its plazas. Its busy square was surrounded on three sides by blocks of stone houses three stories high. The first blocks of houses were built about 1300, evidence shows the town stood empty from about 1400 to the 1500s, and a flurry of new construction came shortly before the Spaniards arrived in the early 1600s.