Pueblo Resistance, Interethnic Conflict, and the Coronado Expedition to Central New Mexico (1540–1542)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In early 1540, hundreds of people assembled in west-central Mexico to start a journey northward searching for an overland route to Asia. The viceroy of Nueva España, Antonio de Mendoza, was sanctioned to conduct the exploration, and chose Francisco Vázquez de Coronado to lead it. The enterprise was one of the largest and most expensive in the early Spanish exploration of the western hemisphere. Three hundred seventy Europeans were accompanied by an estimated 2,000 indigenous Mexican soldiers and laborers from a wide variety of cultural groups. The expedition was the first major contact between outsiders and Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest. Investigation at a large village on the Rio Grande north of Albuquerque NM has revealed physical evidence, underlying tactics, and outcomes of a stand-off between the expedition and the ancestors of today’s Southern Tiwa people. Distinctive artifacts can be tied back to the different groups who used them in the fight. One important element of this work includes identifying many hundreds of stones thrown by Tiwa defenders in defense of their village. This confrontation was the first, but certainly not the last, in decades of struggle between native peoples and would-be colonizers of New Mexico from Nueva España.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53217