Colonial Ideology and the Organization of Spanish Missions in Nuevo México and the Pimería Alta

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists working from a post-colonial framework are increasingly examining how the politics of Indigenous societies in North America structured European colonialism on the continent. In these colonial encounters, conflict and the social transformation that followed often resulted from the dissonance between the imagined, colonial subject and the reality of Indigenous social organization. Understanding the organization of Indigenous societies is therefore not enough; the ideological basis of colonial attempts to organize and control social space is a necessary counterpoint in the dialectic of colonial encounters. We present two case studies to address this issue. We compare the imagined colonial organization of early 17th century Spanish missionization among the Pueblos of New Mexico with 18th century missionization in the Pimería Alta of Arizona and Sonora. Network analysis is applied to documentary evidence to evaluate the idealized structure of Spanish missions systems in both regions. Through this analysis, we highlight areas of dissonance and conflict in the social organization of space through time, as local realities altered colonial expectations. The Spanish attempted to structure mission communities around their own organizational ideals, and these imagined spaces intersected with Indigenous societies to produce the topology of colonial conflict and social transformation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23310