The Spanish Frontier in North America


Book Description

Winner of the 1993 Western Heritage Award given by the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, here is a definitive history of the Spanish colonial period in North America. Authoritative and colorful, the volume focuses on both the Spaniards' impact on Native Americans and the effect of North Americans on Spanish settlers. "Splendid".--New York Times Book Review.




Native and Spanish New Worlds


Book Description

Native and Spanish New Worlds brings together archaeological, ethnohistorical, and anthropological research from sixteenth-century contexts to illustrate interactions during the first century of Native–European contact in what is now the southern United States. The contributors examine the southwestern and southeastern United States and the connections between these regions and explain the global implications of entradas during this formative period in borderlands history.




Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions


Book Description

Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions offers a holistic view on the consequences of mission enterprises and how native peoples actively incorporated Spanish colonialism into their own landscapes. An innovative reorientation spanning the northern limits of Spanish colonialism, this volume brings together a variety of archaeologists focused on placing indigenous agency in the foreground of mission interpretation.




Peace Came in the Form of a Woman


Book Description

Revising the standard narrative of European-Indian relations in America, Juliana Barr reconstructs a world in which Indians were the dominant power and Europeans were the ones forced to accommodate, resist, and persevere. She demonstrates that between the 1690s and 1780s, Indian peoples including Caddos, Apaches, Payayas, Karankawas, Wichitas, and Comanches formed relationships with Spaniards in Texas that refuted European claims of imperial control. Barr argues that Indians not only retained control over their territories but also imposed control over Spaniards. Instead of being defined in racial terms, as was often the case with European constructions of power, diplomatic relations between the Indians and Spaniards in the region were dictated by Indian expressions of power, grounded in gendered terms of kinship. By examining six realms of encounter--first contact, settlement and intermarriage, mission life, warfare, diplomacy, and captivity--Barr shows that native categories of gender provided the political structure of Indian-Spanish relations by defining people's identity, status, and obligations vis-a-vis others. Because native systems of kin-based social and political order predominated, argues Barr, Indian concepts of gender cut across European perceptions of racial difference.




The Bourbon Reforms and the Remaking of Spanish Frontier Missions


Book Description

During the eighteenth century the Spanish Bourbon monarchs attempted to transform Spanish America. This study analyses the efforts to transform frontier missions, and the consequences and particularly demographic consequences for the indigenous peoples that lived on the missions.




Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy


Book Description

In this pioneering book Daniel Usner examines the economic and cultural interactions among the Indians, Europeans, and African slaves of colonial Louisiana, including the province of West Florida. Rather than focusing on a single cultural group or on a particular economic activity, this study traces the complex social linkages among Indian villages, colonial plantations, hunting camps, military outposts, and port towns across a large region of pre-cotton South. Usner begins by providing a chronological overview of events from French settlement of the area in 1699 to Spanish acquisition of West Florida after the Revolution. He then shows how early confrontations and transactions shaped the formation of Louisiana into a distinct colonial region with a social system based on mutual needs of subsistence. Usner's focus on commerce allows him to illuminate the motives in the contest for empire among the French, English, and Spanish, as well as to trace the personal networks of communication and exchange that existed among the territory's inhabitants. By revealing the economic and social world of early Louisianians, he lays the groundwork for a better understanding of later Southern society.




The Spanish Missions of La Florida


Book Description

"A major compendium of the latest effort of a truly blue-ribbon group of scholars. . . . The volume is certain to be a classic among scholars of archaeology, history, and geography, not only in Florida and the Southeast, but among the large numbers involved in Spanish colonial research elsewhere."--Robert L. Hoover, California Polytechnic State University "Continues brilliantly the pattern of excellence established by . . . pioneer mission scholars, [with] much to appeal to the specialist as well as the layman. . . . a good deal of simple, direct, and very interesting writing."--Fred Lamar Pearson, Jr., Valdosta State College This multidisciplinary volume brings together the latest findings of most of the scholars working in southeastern mission studies today, including much information never before published or narrowly circulated. Aimed at a broad audience, it reports the direct results of field research on mission sites. The authors are grappling with the effects of missionization through archaeology, history, bioarchaeology, zooarchaeology, and ethnobotany in order to understand both native and Spanish colonial inhabitants. Contents The Archaeology of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale: Our First Fifteen Years, by David Hurst Thomas Architecture of the Missions Santa Maria and Santa Catalina de Amelia, by Rebecca Saunders The Archaeology of the Convento de San Francisco, by Kathleen Hoffman St. Augustine and the Mission Frontier, by Kathleen Deagan The Mayaca and Jororo and Missions to Them, by John H. Hann Mission Santa Fe de Toloca, by Kenneth Johnson Archaeology of Fig Springs Mission, Ichetucknee Springs State Park, by Brent R. Weisman Spanish-Indian Interaction on the Florida Missions: The Archaeology of Baptizing Spring, by L. Jill Loucks Excavations in the Fig Springs Mission Burial Area, by Lisa M. Hoshower and Jerald T. Milanich Archaeological Investigations at Mission Patale, 1984-1991, by Rochelle A. Marrinan Hispanic Life on the Seventeenth-Century Florida Frontier, by Bonnie G. McEwan On the Frontier of Contact: Mission Bioarchaeology in La Florida, by Clark Spencer Larsen Plant Production and Procurement in Apalachee Province, by C. Margaret Scarry Evidence for Animal Use at the Missions of Spanish Florida, by Elizabeth J. Reitz Beads and Pendants from San Luis de Talimali: Inferences from Varying Contexts, by Jeffrey M. Mitchem A Distributional and Technological Study of Apalachee Colono-Ware from San Luis de Talimali, by Richard Vernon and Ann S. Cordell Bonnie G. McEwan is the director of archaeology at San Luis Archaeological and Historic Site in Tallahassee.




Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas


Book Description

Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas brings together 15 archaeological case studies that offer new perspectives on colonial period interactions in the Caribbean and surrounding areas through a specific focus on material culture and indigenous agency.




Moctezuma's Children


Book Description

Though the Aztec Empire fell to Spain in 1521, three principal heirs of the last emperor, Moctezuma II, survived the conquest and were later acknowledged by the Spanish victors as reyes naturales (natural kings or monarchs) who possessed certain inalienable rights as Indian royalty. For their part, the descendants of Moctezuma II used Spanish law and customs to maintain and enhance their status throughout the colonial period, achieving titles of knighthood and nobility in Mexico and Spain. So respected were they that a Moctezuma descendant by marriage became Viceroy of New Spain (colonial Mexico's highest governmental office) in 1696. This authoritative history follows the fortunes of the principal heirs of Moctezuma II across nearly two centuries. Drawing on extensive research in both Mexican and Spanish archives, Donald E. Chipman shows how daughters Isabel and Mariana and son Pedro and their offspring used lawsuits, strategic marriages, and political maneuvers and alliances to gain pensions, rights of entailment, admission to military orders, and titles of nobility from the Spanish government. Chipman also discusses how the Moctezuma family history illuminates several larger issues in colonial Latin American history, including women's status and opportunities and trans-Atlantic relations between Spain and its New World colonies.