After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

On April 21, 1519, Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Veracruz and, as the saying goes, the rest is history. In this session, we challenge the notion that the Spanish invasion predestined the next 500 years of sociocultural change in Mesoamerica. Participants present innovative studies based on the archaeology of everyday life that show how Native communities and immigrant groups mediated macroregional economic shifts, power relations, resistance, religious conversion, technological innovation, consumption, and mestizaje through material practice. Participants use diverse sources of material, written, and ethnographic evidence to interrogate cause and effect. The short-term, singular voice contexts of written and oral histories are read against the long-term cumulative voice of the material record to reveal continuity and change from the sixteenth century to the present. The papers highlight the transformation of landscapes, households, religious institutions, markets, commodity production, craft workshops, agriculture and animal husbandry from locales across Mexico and Central America. The tangible and material legacies of the conquest in contemporary society, and the tales archaeologists tell that validate or discredit social memories of the invasion, are long overdue for explicit analysis.