In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

“Like Butterflies on a Mounting Board” Pueblo Mobility and Demography before 1825 Jeremy Kulisheck Only recently have precedent and contingency emerged as concepts useful for understanding the historical experiences of ancestral and modern Pueblo1 peoples. For scholars of the era prior to the arrival of Europeans, there is now a recognition that historical experience and the field of choices it offered to Pueblo decision makers is perhaps more critical than elements such as ecological variability for understanding the differential persistence of different social groups (Cameron and Duff 2008; Varien et al. 2007). For the period following the appearance of Old World peoples in the northern Southwest, however, retrospective views of culture change, and in particular demographic change, continue to dominate. Despite empirical evidence to the contrary (see Wilshusen, this volume), the numerical decline in Pueblo and other native populations has been viewed as an inevitable consequence of the European conquest and colonization of the region (see, for example, Barrett 2002; Reff 1991). What several of the other chapters in this volume demonstrate, however, is that the outcomes of European-native encounters and entanglements were as much a product of native social and political organization as they were of the structure of European interventions (see in particular Jordan, Scarry, and Wesson, this volume). Population decline among Pueblo peoples after the arrival of the Spanish is a fact; between 1600 and 1900, Pueblo numbers declined by somewhere between 50 and 75 percent, and more than half of former Pueblo territory was ceded to others (Barrett 2002; Palkovich 1985). The proposition of this chapter is that far from this decline being inevitable, the reasons for this decline are located within the settlement patterns and economy of early modern Pueblo peoples, as well as the durability of these institutions in the face of specific historical events and processes. The arrival of Europeans created 9 Pueblo Mobility and Demography 175 the potential for the decline, but the factors necessary for its occurrence emerged from the structure of Pueblo society itself. The concept of inevitable population decline among native North Americans was rooted in both popular perceptions and the earliest demographic studies of native populations conducted in the early part of the twentieth century (Kroeber 1939; Mooney 1928). The notion received an epistemological boost from the introduction of the Dobyns hypothesis, the idea that Native American populations everywhere suffered catastrophic mortality from the introduction of Old World infectious diseases, sometimes dozens or even hundreds of years before their first face-to-face interaction with Old World populations (Dobyns 1966). The inevitability concept became institutionalized with Henry Dobyns’s methodology of inverse projection, the estimation of precolonial population sizes based on rates of infectious disease mortality. And yet, from the very first archaeological tests of the Dobyns hypothesis, rather than proving to have been inevitable, native North American population decline has been shown to be temporally, spatially, and culturally variable (see Kulisheck 2005 for a review of studies). The objective of this chapter is to examine Pueblo population change in the direction of time’s arrow, and embedded within larger precolonial trends of demographic change, rather than from a retrospective view. By doing this, one arrives at a very different comprehension of the process of population decline. The understanding of this decline lies at the intersection of two historic processes. The first is the long-term mobility strategies that Pueblo peoples employed to sustain subsistence agriculture in a marginal environment, thereby ensuring their biological and social reproduction. The second is the interventions by Europeans that had the potential to constrain Pueblo mobility. The Spanish conquest of the northern Southwest can best be described as ambivalent, in the sense that the word was used by Inga Clendinnen (1987) to describe Spanish domination of the Yucatan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Intermittent exploration of the Pueblo world took place over a sixty-year period in the mid- to late-sixteenth century, with little lasting effect on Pueblo society. The establishment of the Spanish colony in 1598 had profound consequences for the Pueblos, but the contingent of Europeans who attempted to impose their rule was small, internally divided, and isolated from the remainder of European-ruled America 176 Jeremy Kulisheck (Knaut 1995). Against this divided threat, through much of the 1600s, Pueblo peoples were able to employ long-held mobility strategies to escape Spanish rule and in many cases maintain their autonomy and identity (Kulisheck 2003). Eight decades of disease and exploitation had left the Pueblos diminished in numbers...

Share