On the Edge of Purgatory: An Archaeology of Place in Hispanic Colorado

4. Plazas and Community

90 4. Plazas and Community My work as an archaeologist has taken me to canyons, valleys, and prairies across the American West to investigate historic sites. Many of these sites were rural farms or ranches with a single dwelling, a few outbuildings , and landscape features related to the animals and crops once raised there. La Placita stands out among the hundreds of such sites I have documented. Although just as isolated as many of the others, the way the structures are grouped together—facing one another around a central open space—gives the settlement the feel of a tiny village (Figure 18). This is not just a scattering of buildings but a planned community, albeit one at a very small scale. The archaeologists that first recorded this site, myself included, felt confident that it was one of the countless expressions of the plaza settlement , a nearly iconic artifact of the Spanish New World. That is why we named the site La Placita, or “the small plaza.” Testing that assertion was one of the goals of my fieldwork. The buildings of La Placita do not fully enclose a rectangular space. Rather, they create a crescent bordered on its southern edge by a steep drop to the canyon below. Was this rather unconventionally shaped central space planned and used like a more typical plaza? In addition, this settlement came into existence fully two generations after this area was incorporated into the United States and one generation after it became part of Colorado. If La Placita is a plaza settlement, an arrangement that has its roots in New Spain, then researchers have to rethink this way of inhabiting space. The Plaza in Greater Mexico What are the roots, the use, and the meaning of the plaza in Greater Mexico and Colorado in particular? This investigation begins in Spain and ends in the United States. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story is how the plaza changes through time and in scale. The very manipulation of the plaza form can be seen as the socialization of a particular type of space. Plazas and Community 91 The Plaza as Law To the Viceroys, presidents, audiences and governors of our new Indies and to all those convened let it be known: That in order that the discoveries and new settlements and pacification of the land and provinces that are to be discovered, settled, and pacified in the Indies be done with greater facility and in accordance with the service to God Our Lord, and for the welfare of the natives, among other things, we have prepared the following ordinances (trans. in Mundigo and Crouch 1991:18). Thus begins the Law of the Indies, which Phillip II of Spain declared in 1573. The law contained a series of ordinances regarding the proper way to explore, settle, and pacify the New World, both its landscape and its inhabitants. Not only did it present methods for teaching and disci18 . Central open area of La Placita with archaeology crew. View from Feature 11 to Feature 1 complex. (Photograph by author, 2000.) Plazas and Community 92 plining the natives, it also included detailed instructions regarding city planning. Colonists building cities in the Spanish New World were supposed to organize them around a plaza mayor (main plaza) at the center. From there regular streets were to be laid out in a grid, based upon the plaza. “A plan for the site is to be made, dividing it into squares, streets, and building lots, using cord and ruler, beginning with the main square from which streets are to run” (Mundigo and Crouch 1991:24). Municipal and commercial buildings were supposed to ring the plaza, which was to be no less than 200 feet wide and 300 feet long. As architectural scholar Graziano Gasparini writes, “The reticular plan . . . of Spanish-American cities, is a jaded subject, over-researched and with little left unsaid” (Gasparini 1991). This may be true for the lineage of the Law of the Indies plan, but the arguments made by both Gasparini and anthropologist Setha Low (2000) about the influence of pre-Hispanic cultures on its implementation are particularly relevant to New Mexico. Both scholars claim that the Law of the Indies incorporated the experiences of conquistadors in the New World, especially in the orthogonal cities of the Aztecs and the Maya. Indeed, it has been suggested that the Law of the Indies settlement had staying power...