Interpreting Ritual Deposits at a Multiethnic Site in Spanish Colonial New Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Interpreting evidence of ritual practices can be especially challenging in colonial contexts, where people, plants, animals, and materials from various places are forced into direct, sustained contact. In eighteenth-century New Mexico, centuries of Spanish colonialism produced a multiethnic, socially stratified population of agropastoralists who regularly traded and fought with the mobile indigenous groups that surrounded them. San Miguel de Loredo was settled in 1763 by colonial families who sought to improve their lives through property ownership, agriculture, and trade, gambling that these opportunities would outweigh the risks of settling a dangerous frontier. They lost this gamble seven years later when their settlement was attacked and residents were killed, causing the survivors to flee. Recent excavations and the analysis of previous collections from this site have identified several intentional and highly unusual deposits of animal bones and an animal effigy in contexts associated with the construction and destruction of habitation rooms. This paper describes those findings, and draws on broad comparisons to offer some possible interpretations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51425