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CHARLES W. POLZER, S.J. 30 y comments here are an attempt to refocus our current approach in solving the Coronado expedition problem. It is dysfunctional to speak of the Coronado trail any longer; I would rather speak of the Coronado expedition, which is a much more meaningful concept. I delight in the historiographical overview that Dr. Sánchez provides here and the comprehensiveness of his historiography. I suspect that his bibliography includes all the articles written about Coronado since Herbert Bolton’s book, which would be a useful thing to see in print. It is worthwhile to realize the tremendous number of people who have discussed the Coronado expedition and have theorized about its route and perhaps some of the more specific places it passed through. But no matter who has speculated about what, it all comes down to which few documents we actually have, and they are not much. What Dr. Sánchez presents throughout this volume makes it plain that there is not only a lack of unity in what the experts and the documentary historians have done, but nearly a cacophony of interpretation. Often when I talk about Coronado’s route it becomes apparent all over again how confusing are the dates and places, and east and west, and north by needles and south of canyons, and who knows what else. Consequently, I have come to the Their Limitations C H A P T E R 2 The Coronado Documents CHARLES W.POLZER, S.J. 30 THE CORONADO DOCUMENTS 31 strong conclusion that the most important way to handle the Coronado expedition problem is to do it on the ground. I don’t think that you do it at the desk. I insist that archeology is not done by reading reports on ceramics. It is done on the ground. When we look at ambiguous archeological reports (frequently developed with no relevant focus) in order to psyche out the number of sites of Indian pueblos or of types of villages or their distributions, it is clear that new archeological reconnaissance is the only way we have to work out the archeological and documentary discrepancies. And the only way to do that is to start in the south and work north. It is a terrible disservice to begin in the north and go south. That was Bolton’s problem: he came from the north always asking where Coronado had come from to the south. He should have started in Compostela. He would have changed his ideas rather dramatically. Reconnaissance, though, must be guided by the sixteenth-century documents, which brings me to my subject: the limitations of those documents. In the first instance, all of the documents, or nearly all of the documents, that we deal with in the Coronado expedition (with the exception of a couple of letters) are summaries written significantly after the expedition took place or, better said, after the expedition failed. “Failed” because they did not find the gold, or the cities, or the vast numbers of sophisticated Indians that they could enslave, or other ready-to-hand resources. As a result, the accounts depend on distant memory. We don’t have diaries. We don’t have any day-to-day account of where the expedition went or what it did. We have only summary reminiscences, records such as “We spent two days going there and we stayed at this one place.” There is, in addition, the terrible trouble of place names. One of the major things that the historian or anyone using the documents has to confront in guiding oneself archeologically is that the place names are not always site specific. For example, you might think that the expedition was certainly in the village of Yaquimi (Hammond and Rey 1940: 250) or Lachimi (Hammond and Rey 1940: 164) and then you realize that Pedro de Castañeda and Coronado were not always talking about a village. They were often talking about complexes of villages. They were sometimes talking about the pattern in which these people lived. All of us who have worked in the Southwest for many years know that there was not a great capital city. We may be able to point to Casas Grandes as a trading hub, but by and large the cities or, I should say, settlements that we know about were almost, but not quite, ephemeral. They shifted; they changed; they migrated. And obviously they never lasted very long because today we often cannot find even the traces...

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