Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt: Identity, Meaning, and Renewal in the Pueblo World

The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 is a popular topic in Borderlands history and southwestern anthropology. Historians have generally regarded it as an extraordinary and pivotal event and have sought to understand its causes and consequences, using an overarching frontier model tied to the expansion of the Spanish empire. Anthropologists have tended to see it as a temporary response to the inexorable march of acculturation with Western beliefs and practices gradually replacing traditional Pueblo ones. This volume challenges both these perspectives through its emphasis on the agency of Pueblo people, the significance of material culture in mediating acts of resistance and structures of domination, and the character of the various discourses that constitute the oral historical, documentary, and archaeological records of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt includes chapters by Patricia H. Capone and Robert W. Preucel, Kurt E. and Cindy K. Dongoske, Michael L. Elliott, T. J. Ferguson, Rick Hendricks, Matthew J. Liebmann, Mark T. Lycett, Barbara J. Mills, Jeannette L. Mobley-Tanaka, Curtis F. Schaafsma, Joseph H. Suina, Peter Whiteley, and Michael V. Wilcox with an introduction by Robert W. Preucel and a preface by Herman Agoyo of San Juan Pueblo. Among the topics explored are the roles of architecture and settlement in the reconstitution of Puebloan social structures; the uses of ceramics and rock art in legitimizing and mobilizing social ideologies and belief systems; and the effects of alliance formation, population movements, and patterns of warfare on social and political organization. In the process of resistance to Spanish authority, Pueblo people created a new form of historical consciousness, a collective memory and mode of interaction which still serves them as a vital resource today.