Chronicles of Colonialism: Unraveling Temporal Variability in Indigenous Experiences of Colonization in California Missions

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Chronicles of Colonialism: Unraveling Temporal Variability in Indigenous Experiences of Colonization in California Missions," at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Historical archaeologists of colonial California often refer to the “mission period” as encompassing the specific timeframe when missionization took place between 1769 and 1833. But this conceptual shorthand masks considerable complexity. From a top-down perspective, this period covers several distinct historical realities—Spanish colonization, the Mexican War of Independence, and Mexican governance of the missions–not to mention over a decade of the secularization process, beginning in 1833, during which the mission system effectively collapsed. For Native people, these events carried particular implications for how they navigated the ever-shifting colonial landscape. This session explores the methodologies and interpretive approaches employed by archaeologists to understand the temporal variability within the entire period in which the missions operated (1769-1848) and Native experiences under distinct forms of colonialism.