Across a Threshold: The Columbian Exchange in the Land of Tiguex

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In August 1540 Hernando de Alvarado, a member of the Coronado expedition, entered what he termed “the province of Tiguex” (today known as the Middle Rio Grande Valley of Central New Mexico), kicking off several centuries of socioeconomic transformation. As a case study in the impacts of the Columbian Exchange, this region is instructive. Today, it is home to Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest city, and the associated urban sprawl of a twenty-first century Western city. In contrast to the broad, braided river Alvarado observed, the Rio Grande is confined to a relatively narrow channel; many of the grasslands that were so tempting to Coronado’s army have been overgrazed. Native grasses have been joined (and often out-competed) by Eurasian plants, and introduced animals dominate both environments and the diets of the people who live here. Was this a gradual process, with each step having a cumulative impact? Or was the transition more of a threshold change—an abrupt change in environmental processes and/or species composition in a formerly resilient landscape? In this paper, I use the zooarchaeological record of central New Mexico to understand how this transformation occurred and the legacies with which it has left us.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38110.0