New Mexico and the Pimería Alta: A Brief Introduction to the Colonial Period in the American Southwest

Abstract

With the Columbian Quincentenary just a few years off, the Society of American Archaeology (SAA) puzzled its role in anticipating the inevitable events that would surround the 500th anniversary of European-Native American interactions. I was a member of the Executive Committee of the SAA at the time, and the president asked me spearhead the society's efforts for observing the Columbian Quincentenary.Thanks to the support and encouragement of key SAA officers Don Fowler, Prudence Rice, Bruce Smith, and Jerry Sabloff, we were able to develop a plan. After exploring a number of options with the board, we settled upon a series of topical seminars that we dubbed Columbian Consequences.These nine public seminars, to be held over a three-year span, were designed to generate an accurate and factual assessment of what did-and what did not-transpire as a result of the Columbian encounter. We specifically tasked ourselves to probe the social, demographic, ecological, ideological, and human repercussions of European-Native American encounters across the Spanish Borderlands, spreading the word among both the scholarly community and the greater public at large.Although sponsored by the SAA, the Columbian Consequences enterprise rapidly transcended the traditional scope of archaeological inquiry, drawing together a diverse assortment of personalities and perspectives. We invited leading scholars of the day to synthesize current thinking about specific geographical settings across the Spanish Borderlands, which extend from St. Augustine (Florida) to San Francisco (California). Each overview was designed to provide a Native American context, a history of European involvement, and a summary of scholarly research.The structure was fairly simple. Each of three consecutive SAA annual meetings (in 1988, 1989, and 1990) hosted three Columbian Consequences seminars. The resulting three volumes were published by the Smithsonian Institution Press, which remarkably published each volume less than a year after the seminar papers were presented.The initial book, entitled Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West (Thomas 1989), tackled the European-Native American interface from the Pacific Slope across the southwestern heartland to East Texas, from Russian Fort Ross to southern Baja California. The archaeologists involved addressed material culture evidence regarding contact period sociopolitics, economics, iconography, and physical environment. Other authors attempted to provide a critical balance from the perspectives of American history, Native American studies, art history, ethnohistory, and geography.In the intermediate volume-Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East (Thomas 1990)-nearly three dozen scholars pursued a similar agenda across La Florida, the greater Southeast, and the Caribbean.