Indigenous Practices and Material Culture: Seventy Years of Mission Life

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Indigenous Practices and Material Culture: Seventy Years of Mission Life" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Mission San Antonio de Valero was established at its third and final site in 1724. Through its presence, the offer of an abstract vision of the afterlife, the invitation of soldiers, and perhaps a stable food supply, it attracted hundreds of indigenous occupants from as many as 104 named indigenous groups. The mission was secularized in 1793. Today, it is assumed that descendants of the Indigenous population still occupy the neighborhoods surrounding the missions. In this symposium, we focus on Mission San Antonio de Valero to examine the influence of the mission’s religious practices, vocational training, and daily life practices on the Indigenous population. We contrast the pre-mission practices of Indigenous groups to the practices they continued to follow while in the missions to determine what influence, if any, the missionaries had on the Indigenous populations in their care. The participants in the symposium will examine aspects of the indigenous material culture recovered from archaeological investigations to determine continuities and breaks in traditional practices. The participants will also examine the archival record of this mission and others in the Upper San Antonio River basin to forge behavioral correlates of traditional practices and material expressions of those practices in mission contexts.