The Spanish Conquest in the Petatlan, Sinaloa: Cultural Change and Social Reorganization

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Historically, archaeological research in northern Sinaloa, Mexico, focused on the coastal plains, with minimal attempts to comprehend the adjacent archaeological groups scattered in the hinterlands of the Sierra Madre along major water systems. These regions are most often interpreted through the lens of ethnohistorical accounts that provide a window on the complex social organization of the local Indigenous population during the decades that followed colonial contact. Researchers still struggle to comprehend how the colonial intrusion impacted preexisting Indigenous social organization. This poster sheds light on changes that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Indigenous groups’ organization through the use of GIS tools applied to new archaeological data from the Petatlan province. The results indicate there is evidence to infer the establishment of at least one Indigenous monitoring site to surveillance specific missionization areas. Also, settlement pattern data provide tentative insights regarding how missionization efforts impacted Indigenous subsistence economies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36066.0