The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact (review)

Michael Wilcox seeks to showcase "Indigenous" archaeology as a new and improved approach to the study of the Pueblo revolt of 1680. He describes his methodology as "the reintegration of Indigenous materials, remains, history, and research with contemporary Indigenous people" (p. xii) and considers the Pueblo revolt the "most successful Indigenous rebellion in North America" (p. 6). His purpose is ostensibly twofold: to dispel accepted scholarly understanding of disease as a factor relating to Pueblo population decline and to rectify the claim of the "perpetually vanishing primitive" (pp. 52, 53), although the exact source of this idea is not identified. It is an ambitious undertaking with the welcome prospect of revisionist insight into the history of contact and colonial settlement in northern New Spain and seems to contain at least the potential for broadening the scope of the New Conquest History genre.

Wilcox first targets Las Casas and the Black Legend, describing the masterly Brevísima relación as a "plaintive protest essay" (p. 7). Other problems that have led to the creation of false myths, according to Wilcox, arise from the ethnohistorical accounts—their absence, their bias, their incompleteness, and the fact that they were written by Spaniards for their own edification. Ethnographies are troublesome too. For example, Adolph Bandelier's pioneering research in the late 1800s is "groundbreaking in its scope and depth of analysis," yet "speculative by contemporary standards" (p. 218). Although he takes issue with "new ascriptive categories," such as indio and negro (p. 69) because of their stereotyping and blindness to ethnic identities, he himself uses the all-inclusive terms "Indian" and "Pueblo" throughout his work. Doubtless well intended, this is just one example of a book seriously flawed by contradictions, inconsistencies, a lack of knowledge of Spanish and Latin American colonial history, and an egregious absence of copyediting.

One finds "creollos," for criollos (p. 24), "Mooros" for moros (p. 26), and mestizo (and not mulato, to be correct) for a person of European and African ancestry (p. 37). Las Casas (1474-1566) finds himself in dialogue (p. 41) with King Charles II (1661-1700) and Phillip [sic] II, recalling Juan de Oñate in 1606 when he had been dead for eight years (p. 134). A pueblo, as Wilcox applies the term, can be a locale, a structure, an individual, and seemingly all the native peoples in what came to be New Mexico. The ubiquitous "genízaro" is used to describe "Indigenous captives who worked as slaves (p. 143) or a "new kind of Indian" (p. 232), but is finally defined on the last page as a "Christian pueblo" (p. 244). Page 98 introduces a viceroy Guzmán, but no such individual existed. On the same page Wilcox has "peninsulare" for peninsular; "Tlateloco" for Tlatelolco and "capitol" for capital (p. 81); "maese" and "maestro de campo" for maestre de campo (pp. 129, 219); and spellings such as "Hr" (p. 44), "Negro,s" (p. 71), and no end of phrases like "bobcat bear" (p. 161), "surpassingly sparse" (p. 219), "One consequence of the dominance of the dominance of . . ." (p. 17), and "This ambiguity and fluidity create tensions between . . ." (p. 71) that ultimately render the text extremely difficult to read.

To challenge the proposition that epidemic disease among Pueblo peoples caused the population decline that was experienced and documented elsewhere in New Spain, Wilcox depends on the abridged and edited English translations of reports by the leaders of Spanish expeditions into the northern territories. While valuable, they are dated, and there is no evidence that Wilcox examined the original Spanish-language records or any related official, ecclesiastical, or ordinary documents to corroborate or expand his information. His English-language sources, suggest scant mention of disease in the explorers' accounts, or none at all, which supports his proposition that Pueblo peoples fled to remote mountains, thereby avoiding both epidemic diseases and Christianization and thus...