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SEVEN Jars Full of Shiny Metal: Analyzing Barrionuevo’s Visit to Yuque Yunque ANN F. RAMENOFSKY AND C. DAVID VAUGHAN THE YEAR  MARKED the four-hundredth anniversary of Spanish settlement in New Mexico. Newspaper articles, the publication of the don Juan de Oñate stamp, and the construction of the Oñate statue at the newly established Oñate center north of San Juan Pueblo suggested that  would be marked by joyous celebration. Instead, the Cuarto Centenario triggered tricultural conflict and demonstrated that New Mexicans were deeply divided over this anniversary. They questioned whether the year was a time for celebration or mourning. The Oñate statue, symbol of Spanish settlement, stood at the center of the conflict. It took two years of emotional and acrid debate to resolve the controversy and to determine where to display the sculpture. The front-page article of the Albuquerque Tribune for March , , encapsulated the nature of the resolution: “Oñate gets his day; City Council approves statue of controversial conquistador but moves it to the Albuquerque Museum after an ugly, emotional meeting.” Although a single event, the controversy over don Juan de Oñate as a historical symbol epitomizes both the rewards and difficulties of historical and archeological research into the early period of Spanish colonization in New Mexico. On the positive side, New Mexicans care deeply about their history, even though they are alternately proud of and troubled by it. Because of this inherent interest, historians and archeologists could make genuine and substantial contributions to unraveling the myths of history and perhaps healing old wounds. On the other hand, the Oñate controversy underscores the quagmire into which the historical researcher can fall. This quagmire is a product of several factors: historical and archeological tradition and the nature of historical and archeological records that attend the period of initial colonization. Spanish borderlands history begins with the vision of Herbert Bolton. In  focusing on the borderlands, Bolton made Spaniards into mythical figures and downgraded native populations and interactions between Spaniards and indigenous peoples. Conquistadores became knights, and Franciscan missionaries were “explorers and diplomatic agents” who made the frontier safe for colonists. As suggested by the writings of more recent borderlands historians, this perspective is giving way to a more even treatment of the different cultures of contact. In addition, relative to the eastern Spanish borderlands, New Mexico is poor in documentary descriptions, especially for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are few types of documents, and those that do exist are not rich in detail. The relative scarcity of written material makes it difficult to cross-check and analyze observations. Although both ecclesiastical and civil documents from this period survive, what we do not have is as significant as what we do have. There are no mission birth and death records, no wills, no land grant documents, and only a few mining claims. Piecing together even the simplest description, such as the number of encomenderos, is challenging. Although historical archeology could, at least, fill some of the gaps resulting from an impoverished historical record, archeological contributions to historical understanding have been limited in scope. There are several reasons for this situation. First, prehistory has always been the major research focus in Southwestern archeology, having been the subject of sustained investigations for more than one hundred years. Historical archeological investigations, by contrast, have been more sporadic, with only two periods of rather intense research. The earlier effort occurred during the initial decades of the twentieth century. With the exception of Frederick Hodge’s work at Hawikuh, these field projects focused on mission complexes at a time when archeologists were building prehistoric chronologies. For this reason, the historic period assemblages were either cursorily analyzed or were simply footnotes to the prehistory. The more recent period of historical archeology began in the s and is fueled by new and fundamentally different questions. The second reason for limited contributions by historical archeologists is an accident of history. In the eastern Spanish borderlands, there are extensive archival descriptions but limited cultural survival. In the southwestern borderlands, the archival record is far less extensive, but cultural survival has been significant. In other words, what is missing from documents can be investigated in living traditions . For instance, both twenty-first-century and sixteenth-century pueblos have or had village-level political structures. Moreover, there appears to have been continuity in the geographic locations of linguistic groups in New Mexico. Given these links between past and present, it is easy to...

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