Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory

11. A Cubist Perspective of Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions

191 11 A Cubist Perspective of Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions Kent G. Lightfoot The goal of this concluding chapter of Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory is to underscore how the contributors of this volume are breaking new ground in mission archaeology across the Spanish Borderlands of North America. This volume explores colonial encounters in the Spanish mission colonies of La Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Alta California, and Baja California over more than three centuries of history, from the late 1500s through the mid-1800s. This vast territory served as the northern frontier of New Spain where missionaries of the Jesuit, Dominican, and Franciscan orders founded hundreds of missions, mission stations (visitas), chapels (asistencias), and outlying ranches. While there is a long, rich tradition of scholarship on the Spanish Borderlands spanning back more than a century, beginning with such notable scholars as Hubert Howe Bancroft (1888), Herbert Bolton (1921), and Zephyrin Engelhardt (1908–1915), what makes this volume unique is its explicit focus on Native agency and its reconceptualization of missions as both colonial enterprises and dynamic indigenous places. In recognizing that missions were embedded within broader indigenous landscapes, the contributors present a fresh approach for examining how the processes and outcomes of colonial entanglements were greatly influenced by the histories, cultural practices, and political relationships of Native peoples in local regions. I begin my commentary by placing this volume in a historical context that highlights its relationship to the other major synthesis of mission archaeology in the Spanish Borderlands, specifically the seminal multivolume work Columbian Consequences. I then discuss three salient themes—Native–colonial 192 Conclusion negotiations, Native political economies, and missions as nodes in indigenous landscapes—in this volume that highlight how the contributors are taking a more proactive approach in examining how indigenous histories and cultural practices contributed to the creation, development, and eventual abandonment or transformation of the mission colonies over time. I argue that this volume is not only breaking new ground in Borderlands research and our understanding of mission colonies but also making important contributions to the method and theory of archaeology and the study of colonialism. Twenty Years After Columbian Consequences It is fitting that the volume organizers adopted the “cubist perspective” employed by David Hurst Thomas (1989a, 1991b) in his introductory essays to the monumental three-volume Columbian Consequences. The idea that colonial histories can be viewed from multiple, simultaneous perspectives and orientations served as the centerpiece of that first major synthesis of archaeological research in the Spanish Borderlands of North America. Undertaken in commemoration of the Columbus quincentenary, more than one hundred scholars dissected the processes and practices of Spanish colonization from Florida to California (as well as the Caribbean, southern Mesoamerica, and Central America) and the implications it had for local indigenous populations. The centerpiece of this massive publication was the ethnohistory and archaeology of the Catholic missions of La Florida, Texas, the American Southwest, Alta California, and Baja California. As Thomas articulates in the introduction to the work, Columbian Consequences was written during a transitional phase in the practice of historical archaeology in North America. Most of the work in the Spanish Borderlands undertaken up to the middle to late twentieth century tended to be highly Eurocentric, with much of the research conducted by architectural historians focusing on the houses of great men, Spanish missions, and military forts (Thomas 1989a:7). The study of Native peoples and the role they played in Spanish colonies was of minor or secondary importance. Archaeological fieldwork centered on reconstructing the missions quadrangles in Alta California, attempting to detect the locations of historical missions in La Florida where they had almost completely disappeared from the contemporary landscape, or retracing the routes of early explorers, such as Hernando de Soto and Tristán de Luna in the American Southeast (Hudson et al. 1989a, 1989b; Neuerburg 1987; Thomas 1990b, 1991c; Whitehead 1991; see also chapter 5, this volume). A Cubist Perspective 193 Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, however, a number of innovative archaeological studies of Spanish missions and other colonial settlements (presidios , ranchos, etc.) began to flourish across the Spanish Borderlands (Deagan 1983; Farnsworth 1987; Greenwood 1975, 1976; Hester 1977; Hoover 1979; Hoover and Costello 1985; Larsen 1990; McEwan 1993b; Thomas 1987; Thomas et al. 1978). In large part, this reflected the growing sophistication of the incipient field of historical archaeology that built upon various strands of...