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ronouncements in the popular and scholarly press notwithstanding, The Coronado Expedition to Tierra Nueva makes it clear that it is all but impossible to say with certainty that any particular event recorded in the sixteenth-century Coronado documents occurred at any specific place locatable on the ground on a modern map. But the book not only reveals our lingering ignorance as to precisely where Corazones, Chichilticale, the first town of Cíbola, Coofer, the bridge across the Río de Cicúye, the Querecho villages, Cona, and even Quivira were; it also demonstrates that an active group of scholars is working with determination to yield increasing certainty about the route the Coronado expedition followed. Indeed, in Sonora, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, archeological and historical research seems to be bringing us closer to testable hypotheses: to look for Corazones beneath Baviácora; to look for Chichilticale in the Sulphur Springs Valley; to look for Coofer (or Moho, or Arenal) at Santiago Pueblo; to look for the bridge below the junction of the Pecos and Gallinas Rivers; to look for Cona adjacent to Texas’s South Plains. That means that much work remains to be done, after a strong, if slow beginning. The prodigious work of Herbert Bolton regarding the Coronado expedition route has so dominated the field that it has taken the better Concluding Remarks 321 CONCLUDING REMARKS 322 part of fifty years for scholars to look with fresh eyes at the sixteenth-century Greater Southwest. But that reexamination is under way and gathering momentum. The ranks of scholars with interest in unraveling the uncertainties of the Coronado expedition are growing. Cal Riley once asked, “Do we need to put more resources behind documentary research or behind archeology?” The best answer is probably still, “We need both equally.” In study of the historic period, insights from one discipline (history, ethnohistory, archeology, ethnology, ethnobotany, geology, or geography) stimulate shifts in perspective in the others. Knowledge of the mid-summer pilgrimage from Zuni to Ko:thluwala:wa or of the identity of uva moral or of the whiteness of the barrancas of Colima can decisively redirect research. To what extent were the Mexican Indians of the Coronado expedition integrated under European command; to what extent were they independent; was el Turco involved in a plot or monumentally misunderstood; was the Tiwa world permanently disrupted by the expedition’s stay; did relations between Zuni and Sonora suffer because of the events of 1539–1542? Almost all the locations along the Coronado route remain to be examined archeologically or need to be reexamined. New documents need to be located and elucidated and all the known ones need to be made available in annotated originallanguage editions and translations that make clear their modern assumptions. The next several decades promise exciting times for Coronado expedition scholars and increasing popular awareness of the complexity and pertinence of the early history of the Southwest. ...

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