Conversion or Not Conversion: An Analysis of Puebloan Burial Patterns before and after the Introduction of Spanish Catholicism to the US Southwest

Summary

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

Spanish colonization in the seventeenth century of what is now the U.S. Southwest changed the social, political, and religious landscape of the area. One of the stated purposes of the Spanish for colonizing new territories was to spread the word of God as deemed by the Catholic Church. Therefore, with Spanish colonists into what became Nuevo Mexico came Franciscan priests who attempted to convert as many of the Puebloan groups to Spanish Catholicism as they could and enforce that conversion wherever possible. I will address these conversions efforts and analyze the success or lack thereof of the Franciscan priests through changes in Puebloan burial practices from pre-Contact to post-Contact in the pueblos of Abó, Awatovi, Gran Quivira, Pecos, and Quarai. I do so through the framework of hybridity, mortuary theory, and theory of conversion as well as through three separate models and the associated statistical analyses I used to analyze the data. I obtained all the data I utilized in this study from records of excavations and osteological analyses and used this data only after consultations with affiliated tribes. No burial imagery will be shown in the accompanying presentation.

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): 53834