War and Peace in the Sixteenth-Century Southwest: Objected-Oriented Approaches to Native-European Encounters and Trajectories

Summary

Although conflict and conquista campaigns characterized many of the earliest encounters between Native and European groups in New Spain and La Florida, the transformation of objects, communities, and strategic policies in these areas was locally variable and changed dramatically by the close of the sixteenth century. Materials characteristic of these changes and variegated responses are found widely in the archaeological record of the American Southwest, but have seldom been explored for the insights they provide into broader anthropological themes such as resistance, exchange, and agency. While this study focuses on the fine-grained, contextual analysis of objects, its broader goal is to compare cultural trajectories at the regional and inter-regional scales, particularly the congruence and contrasts between the American Southwest and Southeast in the first century of New-Old World contact. Both areas transitioned from initial imperial strategies of acquisition and conflict, to policies of settlement and missionization by the end of the 1600s, and in both areas a similar suite of European objects was available. Nevertheless, the manner in which these objects were employed by Natives and Europeans varies significantly and in ways that reveal to us important aspects of the earliest Colonial encounters in North America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15575