Pueblo Agricultural Persistence and Innovation during Spanish Colonization

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This project investigates how (and to what extent) Pueblo people in the Rio Grande region of New Mexico adjusted their agricultural practices when confronted with Spanish colonization. The data collected for this project involved surveying the areas around multiple pre-contact and contact-era Pueblos to document agricultural features and any changes in those features or technologies with colonization, as well as analyzing sediment samples to determine the types and density of plants grown in the fields. The three results discussed in this presentation are the macrobotanical plant diversity analyses that demonstrated the continuing utility of the Pueblo agricultural technologies for fostering plant growth; the pollen and phytolith samples obtained from the agricultural fields which provided evidence of persistence, but also increase and diversification of Pueblo crops; and the minimally-destructive coring and XRF methodology developed as part of this project that proved effective for target-sampling agricultural lenses without needing to do excavation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology