A "Snapshot" of the Mid-Sixteenth-Century Colonial Culture of New Spain: the 1559-1561 Tristán de Luna y Arellano Settlement on Pensacola Bay.

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.

Since the 2015 discovery of the 1559-1561 Tristán de Luna y Arellano Settlement on Pensacola Bay, archaeological investigations have yielded material traces of a distinctively "New Spanish" colonial culture. In 1559, a mere 38 years after Cortes’ conquest of Mexico, Luna was dispatched from Veracruz with 12 ships, 1,500 colonists, including 200 Aztec Indians, and an abundance of supplies to establish a settlement on Pensacola Bay. After just over a month, a hurricane struck the settlement, destroying seven ships and the majority of the colony’s food stores. Over the next two years, the Viceroy of New Spain sent four relief fleets to Pensacola that included items produced in Mexico, as well as items adopted by resident colonial Spaniards (whether Spanish-born or New World-born) from indigenous Mexican cultures. Utilizing documentary evidence and artifacts recovered from the Luna settlement site, this paper characterizes a "New Spanish" assemblage, explores the adoption of Aztec or other indigenous food and material culture, and the continued incorporation of indigenous Aztec people into exploratory expeditions launched out of New Spain (including the 1540-1542 Coronado expedition), offering a "snapshot" of the colonial culture of New Spain and providing some instructive insights into Spanish-Aztec relations during the mid-sixteenth century.

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)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24358