Spanish-Pueblo Interactions in New Mexico’s Early Colonial Spanish Households: Negotiations of Knowledge and Power in Practice

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeologies of Contact, Colony, and Resistance" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Missions and indigenous villages are commonly investigated contexts of indigenous action in response to early years of Spanish colonialism in the American Southwest. In New Mexico, colonists’ households were also a venue for interaction and exchange of information between Pueblos and Spanish. Some models of colonial interactions have suggested that quotidian practices developed along dimensions of gender and ethnicity. However, Spanish New Mexican households, especially in the early colonial period, were contexts where power dynamics were multifaceted and knowledge of the local environment was useful. To explore Spanish New Mexican households, we use the concept of hybridity, a term not typically associated with investigations of colonizers, but one that assumes a more deliberative negotiation of practice. Such an approach with respect to colonizers’ homes helps to focus attention on the power that indigenous people had and knowledge colonizers may have valued. In this paper, we explore the material remains of several 17th-century Spanish ranches in northern New Mexico as they illuminate the interactions between Spanish colonists and Pueblo wives, servants, slaves, and laborers. Using architecture and artifacts, we explore ways these ranches were constructed and inhabited and the interplay between Pueblo and Spanish ways of making do.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeologies of Contact, Colony, and Resistance   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23271