'The Shape which all that which is Settled has is that of a Cross': Negotiating Inscription and Experience in the Sacred Landscapes of 17th Century New Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the emergent social geography of empire, Franciscan missions were agents of spatial production as well as colonial establishment. Their foundation, form, and operation instantiated claims to and about society, dominion, and the culmination of history. These claims were forged within an already extant, meaningful, and ritually significant landscape defined by the dynamic experience of the region’s Pueblo inhabitants and marked by a nested complex of ceremonially resonant features. Missionaries inscribed their own image of sacrality upon Puebloan ceremonial geographies, as embodied in distinct physical markers radiating out from the mission and its associated architectural complex. This paper explores these contingent and contested sacral landscapes through an examination of recent archaeological research in the Middle Rio Grande valley, with a focus on the Galisteo and Albuquerque-Belen basins.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23085