Untangling Shifting Social Agendas at Colonial Achiutla, Oaxaca, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper, I draw on both archaeological and documentary evidence from the site of San Miguel Achiutla, in the Mixtec region of Oaxaca, Mexico, to examine the complex relationships that residents of this indigenous community had with colonial Spanish rule. At certain points, members of the community harassed resident Dominican friars and threatened their lives, while at others helped them translate the Christian doctrine into the Mixtec language. Indigenous families actively acquired certain European goods and participated in the newly imposed economic system, while they simultaneously rejected other European technologies in favor of prehispanic ones. Native officials cooperated with Spanish viceregal and religious authorities on certain matters, while in other instances they assaulted and imprisoned these same officials for interfering in community matters.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that indigenous community members did not see the Spanish colonial project as something monolithic, to be simply accepted or resisted on the whole. Instead, engagement or disengagement with the viceregal system and Spanish authorities shifted from situation to situation, from moment to moment, depending upon a complex suite of political, economic, and spiritual agendas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22964