Changes in Arrow Point Morphology in the San Antonio Missions: What is it Telling Us?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Indigenous Practices and Material Culture: Seventy Years of Mission Life" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Indigenous population of the San Antonio missions was drawn from five distinct regions of north and south of the Rio Grande. The ethnic groups indigenous to these regions manufactured distinct arrow point forms prior to entering the missions in the early eighteenth century. Yet over the next 70 years there is a gradual coalescence of this morphological variability towards a lanceolate form found in low numbers in the San Antonio River Basin prior to the appearance of the missions. This presentation explores the possible meaning of this coalescence in projectile point morphology and suggests that ethnic groups found in small numbers in the missions gravitated toward the dominant groups. And they signaled this shift in identity politics by adopting the projectile point forms of the dominant ethnic enclave.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Indigenous Practices and Material Culture: Seventy Years of Mission Life

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51504