What’s in a Microscopic Signature? Can We See Social Acceptance and Resistance?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Colonization of Central and North America involved Spanish mission construction and growing wheat necessary for Eucharist bread. Using evidence of threshing technology, represented by cut phytoliths, as an indicator of trait adoption, we examine missions in California and the southwestern Puebloan region. Introduction of a new religion, new icons, new structures, and new food into traditional cultures is examined using quality of threshing evident in these locations. Traditional threshing sledge use in Spain, the Near East, and circum-Mediterranean produces tiny to microscopic cut straw fragments, establishing a standard. This also was observed in California adobe. The New Mexican Pecos Mission adobe samples, however, yielded wheat seeds and large straw fragments with cuts, indicating coarser chopping and suggesting resistance to adoption of the new system. Challenges of supplanting well-known maize cultivation and processing by wheat in the Puebloan community are compared with success in introducing wheat cultivation and processing to people in California who did not have a grain-based economy. Maintaining standards appears to have been more difficult in New Mexico, suggesting other challenges in a transition not only from maize to wheat, but also in religion and socially, as is evidenced by the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33073