Native and Spanish New Worlds: Sixteenth-Century Entradas in the American Southwest and Southeast

7. Regarding Sixteenth-Century Native Population Change in the Northern Southwest

Historical and archaeological analyses across the North American Southeast have repeatedly shown significant sixteenth-century decline of Native populations, primarily from introduced infectious diseases, but assisted by warfare, exploitation, and nutritional stress (Hutchinson, this volume; Ethridge and Mitchem, this volume; Ramenofsky 1987). The repetition of this spatial pattern is a strong warrant for the inference that, in large parts of the Southeast, sixteenth-century Native populations had declined dramatically. By contrast, there is no consensus regarding the nature of Native population change in the North American Southwest during the same century. Based on the demonstration of demographic collapses among Native populations elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, several scholars have argued for significant sixteenth-century Native population decline caused primarily by infectious disease introduction (Dobyns 1992, 2002; Thornton 1987; Upham 1982, 1992). Others believe that the onset of demographic decline from warfare, disease, or both occurred a century later (e.g., Barrett 2002; Flint and Flint 2002; Kulisheck 2003, 2005; Ramenofsky et al. 2009; Reff 1991). Even given seventeenth-century decline , however, the relatively greater persistence of Native Southwestern societies into the present suggests that the loss was of a magnitude smaller than occurred across the Southeast. Here we use documentary descriptions and archaeological settlement records to review the evidence that the northern Southwest, the heartland of the Pueblo peoples, was demographically stable through the sixteenth century. We analyze history and archaeology independently , and this separation is both deliberate and essential. Archaeology and history differ in terms of scale and resolution. As scale (or scope) increases, resolution (or detail) decreases. The concepts Regarding Sixteenth-Century Native Population Change in the Northern Southwest Ann F. Ramenofsky and Jeremy Kulisheck  124 Disease not only account for major differences between the disciplines but also have implications for building knowledge of the period. Conquest documents are typically written by a single individual at a particular time and address specific events. Artifact distributions, by contrast, are the result of collective activity that accumulates over sometimes-substantial periods of time. As a result, historical writing is generally at a lower scale with high resolution. The archaeological record is the opposite. It is formed and survives at a higher scale with lower resolution. These differences between archaeology and history combined with the value placed on writing means that archaeological information can be lost between the lines of history. This we do not want to do. The separation of archaeological and historical records allows us to compare the evidence from one record to the other. Happily, in the case being addressed here, the analyses are mutually confirming. While there are clear historical and archaeological demographic shifts in the northern Southwest during the 1500s, the regional-scale Pueblo trends are commensurate with the patterns of demographic coalescence and contraction that characterized Pueblo demography and settlement since the mid-twelfth century. For the Pueblos, the sixteenth century was a period of relative demographic stability. The arrival of the Spanish resulted in severe short-term disruptions and localized abandonments. However, significant population changes, including decline, did not occur until the early or mid-seventeenth century. Historical Records The Spanish explorer accounts of the northern Southwest are temporally confined to the period after a.d. 1538 and include the records of ten expeditions (Hammond and Rey 1940, 1953, 1966; Mathers, this volume). Although useful demographic information on the question of Native population stability or decline is embedded in most of these chronicles, there are also several methodological problems that dictate the most productive way to use the information. First is the issue of Pueblo population counts (Kulisheck 2005). All population figures mentioned in the documents are estimates made by unfamiliar observers as they traveled from one village to another. They are not equivalent to population counts taken from mission registries, tax rolls, or census Native Population Change 125 counts, records that are amenable to quantitative verification of their accuracy. Second are the translations themselves. Except for Richard and Shirley Flint’s research of the Francisco Vázquez de Coronado expedition (Flint 2008; Flint and Flint 2002), the translations of the other explorations are of a much earlier vintage (Hammond and Rey 1966; Hodge et al. 1945). Because historiographic methods and knowledge build over time, we do not know whether and how scholarly understanding postdating the Vázquez de Coronado explorations would change under the close scrutiny by contemporary historians. Given that we...