My primary interest is in the material record of 16th/17th-century settlements that were abandoned under reducción/congregación policies, especially in Nueva España (Mexico). I'm working on what was very likely a "reduced-abandoned" pueblo in New Mexico in the 1620s/30s and would like to compare material patterns of similar abandonments from a wider area. Gracias mil for any information you may have.
For Peru, check the work of Steve Wernke (Vanderbilt) and Parker van Valkenburgh (Vermont).
Thanks, Daniel, for the Peru references. I'll check them out.
Johanset, I've read up on the published material of the Florida missions, and I think I've extracted most of the data that are valuable for purposes of comparison.
The general difficulty seems to be that while there are data for the mission settlements (the "recipient communities" as it were), I can find little to nothing on "donor communities," i.e. the communities that lost their populations to the mission settlements.
The peculiar circumstances of reducción/congregación must have left a distinct abandonment signature at the donor settlements , at least that's what it looks like for the New Mexican pueblo I've been looking at. Now I'm wondering if similar archaeological signatures have been recorded elsewhere.
Saludos, Michael
Dear Michael, for Brazil, I suggest the work of Arno Kern (PUC-RS, Porto Alegre).
Here's the link for his cv. There are lots of references in there: http://buscatextual.cnpq.br/buscatextual/visualizacv.do?id=K4783144Z9
Dear Michael,
For Guatemala and Yucatan you might look at the work of Rani Alexander, Richard Leventhal, and Joel Palka. I think you might find Dr. Alexander's web page (http://anthropology.nmsu.edu/anth-faculty/alexander/) a good place to start. Good luck!
There has been a lot of work on the missions in California. Studies in San Diego County discuss Kumeyaay villages in the hinterland of the mission-sphere. In particular, the villages in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park. There is an interesting article by Michael P. Sampson that mentions those villages. (http://www.pcas.org/documents/sampsonstonetool.pdf) Silliman and Lightfoot are two people who come to mind when thinking about the contact period. Maybe they are already on your radar. I'm not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for, but good luck!
Hi Michael,
Also for Brasil, besides Profesor Arno Kern (as pointed out by Rita Scheel-Ybert), you can check Tobias Vilhena (https://unicamp.academia.edu/TobiasVilhena).
Nice subject to study. Good luck!
Thanks everyone, for all the suggestions. I think they will keep me occupied for some time :-)
In the New Mexican case I've been referring to, the particular circumstances of a reducción-type abandonment are only vaguely alluded to in the historical record. The proximity of a known Franciscan mission pueblo, however, provides a significant clue as to what may have happened to the neighboring pueblos (as does the ceramic chronology).
To test this hypothesis versus other possible abandonment scenarios, what is needed are extensive abandonment deposits. Unfortunately, for New Mexico such archaeological records really exist only for pre-contact pueblos. Folks like M. Schiffer, C. Cameron, M. Stevenson, however, have provided a theoretical framework that allows one to identify a range of abandonment conditions and their corresponding material patterns.
Question for me now is, how does the abandonment pattern from "my" pueblo stack up against other sites that are known or suspected to have been "reduced" as the result of a Spanish mission settlement. I haven't yet really seen any mission-period studies that focus on abandonment deposits to the extent necessary for addressing the issue of reducción.
Hopefully I'll be able to find something going over all your suggestions. Thanks again!
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