Maintenance of Tribal Communities in the California Spanish Missions

Summary

In this symposium, we have been tasked with investigating how communities were forged during the Mission Period in California (1769-1834). Some researchers currently suggest that diverse indigenous populations in mission communities formed collective Indian communities and identities (e.g. Lightfoot 1998; Panich 2009; Peelo 2009). However, others maintain that indigenous peoples were not only part of a mission community, but they were simultaneously part of diverse traditional village communities during the colonial period (Haas 2014). When we look beyond the mission walls (e.g. Panich and Schneider 2014; Schneider 2012), we may learn something new about what Indian communities looked like in Colonial California. Within the mission walls it may be true that indigenous peoples were trying to form collective groups sharing in cultural practice. But outside of those walls, people may have maintained diverse communities, tied not to the mission, but to their home village. Here, we investigate community in colonial Alta California by exploring the details of traditional community maintenance that occurred outside the mission walls through investigation of the mission registries. We also propose ideas for archaeologically investigating the persistence of indigenous tribal communities during the colonial period.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Forging of Communities in Colonial Alta California, 1769-1834

Keywords

Spatial Coverage