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

109 6 Dismembering and Remembering The Simulacra of Post-Revolt Settlements With the sun hanging low in the southern sky of late 1681 the Spaniards questioned Pedro Naranjo, an eighty-year-old “sorcerer and idolater ” from San Felipe Pueblo. The octogenarian was an esteemed holy man in his home community and had been sent to the southern Pueblos by the leaders of the Revolt to “teach superstitions” during the lingering nights of mid-December in 1681.1 The Spaniards took Naranjo into custody at Isleta, where under interrogation the old man provided the most comprehensive testimony of all of the Pueblo prisoners captured and questioned by Oterm ín in the wake of the Revolt. Not only did he report the motives, factors, and historical circumstances underlying the rebellion stretching back over more than three decades, but he also provided expansive details regarding the dyadic nature of Po’pay’s orders. More than any other witness, Naranjo laid bare the two complementary halves of Po’pay’s mandate: first, to eliminate Spanish contagion from the Pueblo world; and second, to reestablish traditional , pre-Hispanic Pueblo practices. According to Naranjo, once they had razed the churches, washed away the oils of baptism, and dissolved the sacrament of Christian marriage, Po’pay had assured the people that “they would live as they had in ancient times . . . this was the better life and the one they desired, because the God of the Spaniards was worthless and theirs was very strong, the Spaniards’ God being rotten wood.”2 In anthropological parlance, directives demanding the elimination of all foreign accoutrements and influences are classified as nativism, while the introduction of cultural practices thought to have been characteristic of previous generations (but not recently practiced by a social group) is known as revivalism. At the most basic level, both nativism and revivalism are bound up in the phenomenon of “social memory”—the ways in which shared ideas about the past are revived, referenced, dismissed, ignored, selectively utilized, Chapter 6 110 and amended (Van Dyke 2009:220). Nativism frequently involves acts of intentional forgetfulness, as when Po’pay ordered the Pueblos to purge all evidence that Spaniards had ever set foot into the sands of New Mexico, wiping their very existence from the collective Pueblo consciousness. Likewise, revivalism inherently involves a process of remembering, as when the Tewa prophet attempted to stoke memories of a utopian past before the foreigners had appeared in the lands of their ancestors. In recent years investigations of social memory have proliferated in the discipline of archaeology, with studies of “the past in the past” utilizing material culture to investigate acts of commemoration and collective amnesia in distant times (Bradley and Williams 1998; Joyce 2000; Alcock 2002; Bradley 2002; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003; Golden 2005; Jones 2007; Yoffee 2007; Mills and Walker 2008a; Van Dyke 2009). Many of these studies have built on pioneering work on social memory by social theorists Maurice Halbwachs (1992 [1925]) and Paul Connerton (1989; 2006). Halbwachs’s (1992:43) contention that “no memory is possible outside frameworks used by people in society to determine and retrieve their recollections” served to shift the analysis of memory from individual psychology to the realm of collective interaction. Likewise, Connerton’s (2008:59) distinction between “inscribed memories” and “incorporated memories” has proven particularly influential in anthropological analyses in recent years. Inscribed memories, glossed here as intentional commemorations of the past, have been rebranded as “citation” in archaeological literature recently. Conversely, incorporated memories can be defined as habitual practices that recursively, and often unconsciously, create and reference the past. Archaeological studies have begun to break down the distinction between inscribed and incorporated memories of late, focusing on the ways in which habitual practices and intentional memorializations work in concert to form social memories (Van Dyke 2009:222; Mills and Walker 2008b:6–7). The Jemez people combined processes of remembering and forgetting after the Pueblo Revolt in the construction of Patokwa and Boletsakwa. At both of these new villages, architecture was used to reference ancestral lifeways , which were combined with habitual practices to allude to the preHispanic past. This amalgamation of nativism, revivalism, and architecture comes as no surprise, as Naranjo’s testimony directly linked the built environment to the ideology of cultural revitalization espoused by the leaders of the 1680 Revolt. According to Naranjo, after the Revolt Po’pay “saw to it that [the Pueblo people] at once erected and rebuilt their houses of idolatry . . . and that they could erect their...

Share