Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory ed. by Lee M. Panich, Tsim D. Schneider (review)

In publishing this edited volume, Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider intended to counter a historical colonial bias in mission archaeology, urging their readers to “consider the potential for studying Spanish missions within indigenous landscapes” (5). The volume includes contributions from scholars engaged in archaeological and ethnohistorical research at Spanish missions in the modern states of California, New Mexico, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. The editors arrange these contributions into themes that focus on the role of Spanish missions within existing indigenous political landscapes (part 1), social and economic networks (part 2), and wider cultural landscapes (part 3). These themes are broad, but this is understandable in an edited volume that includes research from such diverse regions, contexts, and periods in time. Kent Lightfoot provides closing commentary.

While the individual chapters vary in focus and content, the volume as a whole succeeds in demonstrating the value of viewing missions from an indigenous perspective. Focusing on the indigenous cultural and physical environments of the missions enables the authors to explore how local factors influenced the process of missionization. For example, Tamra L. Walter and Thomas R. Hester argue that in South Texas indigenous populations incorporated the Spanish missions into their foraging economies, but could not be forced to settle permanently at those sites. The mission enterprise was equally unsuccessful among horticultural populations in East Texas where, as Paul S. Marceaux and Mariah F. Wade argue, Spanish missionaries lacked the military and economic power to compel or persuade the Caddos to accept missionization. Focusing on neophyte populations within their wider cultural settings also makes it easier to recognize instances of cultural borrowing and change (see Rubén G. Mendoza’s chapter on the Mexicanization of California Indians), and to thereby avoid the pitfall of interpreting changes in material culture as evidence of cultural extinction. This is no small thing; Panich and Schneider point out that the early scholarly narratives about California missionaries working native populations to extinction have hurt descendants of those missionized populations as they seek to gain federal recognition as Indian tribes.

There are some shortcomings. As with most edited volumes, not all contributions are equally focused on the themes and questions introduced by the editors. The volume also would have benefited from a more focused discussion of the meaning of indigeneity, as it is clear from reading different chapters that many overlapping indigenous landscapes existed and there are numerous ways of understanding indigeneity, both during colonial times and in the present. Nevertheless, this volume is a valuable contribution to the literature on Spanish colonialism and colonialism in general, both for the update it provides on Spanish mission archaeology in the United States and for the direction it offers on how and why to apply an indigenous landscape perspective.