A Slow Burning Fuse: Spanish Colonialism, Franciscan Missions, and Pueblo Population Changes in Northern New Mexico

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.

For nearly half a century, prevailing models of post-Contact Native American demography have held that the appearance of Europeans and Africans in the New World sparked a rapid and catastrophic population decline across North America in the sixteenth century. Recent archaeological investigations in the Pueblo Southwest and elsewhere have questioned this model, suggesting instead that Native American population decline followed a very different trajectory than previous models have suggested. This paper presents archaeological data from ancestral Jemez Pueblo villages and Franciscan mission sites in the Jemez Valley of Northern New Mexico in support of a new model of post-Contact Pueblo population, which raises an entirely new set of questions revolving around contact, colonialism, and indigenous resilience.

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): 24788