The First Bite: Archaeological Traces of Early Spanish Colonial Carpentry from Quarai and Pecos Pueblos

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Primary sources attest to the training of Indigenous carpenters in early colonial New Mexican woodworking. By the 1620s, Spanish craftsmen began introducing techniques based in the widespread Iberoamerican Mudéjar carpentry vernacular, which Pueblo artisans learned and used in constructing Franciscan missions. These accounts have received little study nor testing, however, based in the presumption that the 1680 Pueblo Revolt destroyed almost all early carpentry in New Mexico. In fact, scattered archaeological traces and remnants permit a partial reconstruction of early New Mexican carpentry and processes of cultural negotiation through the medium of woodcarving. Combining the contextualizing methods of archaeology with analysis of museum collections, this paper uses the earliest known archaeological remnants of colonial woodwork to explore the transmission and significance of pre-Revolt carpentry. It relies upon remnant artifacts from Quarai (c. 1623-1628 CE) and Pecos (c. 1620-1630s CE), now in the collections of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, the Center for New Mexico Archaeology, and the Pecos NHP. Surviving amidst carbonized fragments and architectural remnants, the “bite” of chisels and gouges characteristic of these early carpenters speak to their technical faculty, but also processes of intercultural negotiation, meaning making, and violence amidst the entanglements of colonial New Mexico.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38121.0