O’odham Irrigated Agriculture Response to Colonization on the Middle Gila River, Southern Arizona

Abstract

the editors of this volume, have told me that the Columbian Consequences project served as a catalyst for the initial symposium entitled "Transformations during the Colonial Era: Divergent Histories in the American Southwest," subsequently published as this volume. They also asked me to write a few words about the Columbian Consequences effort, from a quarter-century perspective.The roots of Columbian Consequences run back to the late 1980s, a time of considerable stress and not a little self-reflection in the Americanist archaeological community. A decade of repatriation and reburial debate would culminate in the 1990 The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) legislation. Competing paradigms of processual and postprocessual archaeology generated lively conversations about future directions of archaeological theory. The rapid growth of applied archaeology (in the form of cultural resource management) tested the conventionally academic structure of the archaeological profession. Long-standing issues of gender bias clouded archaeological interpretations of the past and the practice of archaeology in the present. xvi | ForewordWith 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 volum...