Why is one of the most successful Indigenous rebellions in the Americas nearly unknown? In 1680 the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico rose up against their European colonizers. For the next twelve years the Pueblos lived free from Spanish oppression, a period that proved crucial in the formation of the modern American Southwest.
Why didn’t we all learn about the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in history class? And why does this watershed event still languish in relative obscurity today? Matthew J. Liebmann will show how today’s archaeology is changing views of this historic rebellion.
Matthew J. Liebmann, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, author of Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico.
Recorded 2/7/13
Transcript
The Other American Revolution: Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680
[00:00:17.45] I'd like to state that though it is not apparent, the lecture series is under new management, now being run for the Peabody Museum by the newly created Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. And you'll be hearing more and seeing more about this institution, which is going to serve as the public face of our separate parent museums, which the Peabody is one, from now into the future. And we're all looking forward to this new collaboration.
[00:00:48.03] So it'll all look the same, but it's all different. I'd also like to announce that there will be a reception after the talk in the hall of North American Indian. We will guide you to where that is if you're not familiar with it. And before we hear tonight's lecture, I want to let you know that the next lecture is the kick off the divination series.
[00:01:15.43] Professor Dan Gilbert of Harvard Psychology Department will talk about happiness, what your mother didn't tell you. And that will be at 6:00 PM right here in this room on February 20th. After that, we'll have another talk by yours truly on March 14th, also on a theme on colonial archaeology in the New World.
[00:01:38.90] And for a complete list of our spring programs, pick up our calendar at the table off to my right. And please join the Peabody Museum's mailing list, email list, and get regular updates on our events. Thank you.
[00:01:54.14] The story of the European encounter, as it's sometimes called, with Indigenous Americans was a controversial topic, even when it was taking place. From one perspective, it was a great adventure of conquest and conversion for God, gold, and glory. From another, I agree, it was sad, it was the black legend of avarice and depredation.
[00:02:21.69] A leading scholar of early colonial Peru, for example, has described the first two generations of the Spanish presence there as operating on a plunder economy. That about summarizes it. Over the centuries since those times, I think it's safe to say that there's been a generally negative reaction to dealing with the Americas in the late 16th century and the early 17th century, especially in archaeology, whose practitioners tend to largely be sympathetic to the indigenous peoples, past and present.
[00:02:57.98] But this attitude has left the field of scholarly investigation of the conquest and early colonial periods entirely to historians. And yet, one would expect that archaeology has something to contribute to understanding those times, as troubling and disturbing as they may be, may have been. In the last decade or so, this scholarship has started to move in a different direction. And there's been an exponential growth in historical archaeology of the conquest and early colonial periods in the Americas.
[00:03:32.24] I think it's fair to say Harvard University is taking a leading role in this, not only in terms of our on campus involvement with the archaeology of Harvard Yard and the search for the Indian College, but also a number of faculty have interest in this period. Tom Cummins, in the History of Art and Architecture Department, Gary Urton, in Anthropology, and myself, and, of course, tonight's speaker, Matt Liebmann. And we're very happy that he's joined us.
[00:04:04.34] He's now an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology here. He's published in numerous journals. But he began his career with receiving a BA in English and Theology from Boston College in 1996. And following his graduation, he taught at Red Cloud High School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, before entering graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania.
[00:04:31.54] At Penn, he was a William Penn Fellow and member of the Kolb Society Fellows at the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. And from 2003 to 2005, he worked as a tribal-- as the tribal archaeologist and NAGPRA program director at the Pueblo of Jemez Department of Resource Protection. In 2006, he received his PhD in anthropology and was named a University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences dean scholar.
[00:05:00.66] He won the society-- very prestigious award-- he won the Society for American Archaeologist Dissertation Award in 2007, when he was an assistant professor at the College of William and Mary, and began teaching at Harvard in 2009. And he was also a William and Rita Clements Fellow for the study of Southwestern America at the Southern Methodist University in 2010.
[00:05:22.03] So he comes with a great amount of experience and involvement with contemporary living Native America, as well as the past. It's a pleasure to know him as a colleague and to introduce him for his lecture on the other American Revolution. Please welcome Matt Liebmann.
[00:05:38.27] [APPLAUSE]
[00:05:46.58] Let's see if this is on. Can you guys hear me all right? Yes, no? Go ahead and tell me louder or softer, as the case may be. I'm going to pace around here. Thank you to Jeff for that very nice introduction, and to the Peabody for having me here tonight. As you all know, I'm going to talk about a Native American Revolution.
[00:06:10.89] Revolution, always a somewhat contested term, but I would suggest that there are some important similarities between the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the American Revolution that happened nearly 100 years later here on the east coast. In both cases, we had a local populace, largely made up of farmers, who grew disgruntled with the European sovereign that ruled them from palaces across the Atlantic.
[00:06:39.05] They were not happy about what they saw as unfair taxation. So they met together at night and planned a rebellion, just like the people in the Boston Tea Party. These guys dressed like Indians because they were. But this revolution happens a hundred years before the American Revolution and nearly 3,000 miles to the west, along the Rio Grande, in an area that was colonized first by the Spanish.
[00:07:08.44] So my laser pointer went somewhere. Whoops, did I leave it out there? Well, I guess I'll have to do it manually. So let me track that down. That's not it either. All kinds of problems. There it is, thank you. Magically, it appears.
[00:07:34.29] So tonight, I'm going to talk about-- if this advances-- everything's frozen up for some reason here. Oh, dear. Now it's going to go like five slides ahead, and I'm going to have to come back. Well, that's where it's supposed to be.
[00:08:01.49] So I want to talk about the Pueblo Revolt tonight. And the first question I want to ask is why don't we know the story of the Pueblo Revolt. Oh, this is unbearable in how long this is taking. As I mentioned, this a story with incredible parallels to the American Revolution. And it would seem that we'd have a lot to learn, not only from the story of the Pueblo Revolt, but a lot that we can learn about ourselves and about responses to colonialism in general.
[00:08:33.33] This is really-- sorry, you know what? I'm going to try and exit here and see if I can restart this to see if I have any better luck. It may be catching up. I'm just-- I'm not going to push it. I'll go from here and I'll just try and do that click.
[00:09:06.19] So as you saw on the previous slide, I'm asking why we don't know this story. Well, one of the reasons we don't know this story is the adage that we've all heard before that history is written by the winners. And in the case of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the winners were the Pueblo Indians, who banded together, rose up in August of 1680, killed 401 Spanish colonial settlers and Franciscan priests, and expelled the Spaniards from New Mexico for a period of 12 years.
[00:09:42.47] This is generally regarded as one of the most successful indigenous rebellions in the history of North America. So because the Spaniards lost this battle and the Native Americans involved did not record their own histories in writing, the written history of this period is largely nonexistent. We have some details about the uprising from the Spanish perspective, but the winners, in this case, didn't write. So we don't have a historical record of it.
[00:10:13.89] What we do have, however, is the artifacts, the villages, the rock art, that these people left behind from this period. So what I try and do in my work is piece together the gaps in our history to try and figure out what occurred during the Pueblo Revolt period and try and give voice to some of the people that are not recorded. This is, as Jeff mentioned, what we call historical archaeology.
[00:10:43.49] For a long time, archaeologists didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the historic period. Particularly where I work in the southwest, people were far more interested in eras of prehistory. But over the past 50 years, a new discipline has really come to the fore.
[00:11:05.37] The bias of prehistoric archaeologists, though, has been why should we study the historic period, we have documents, we know what happened there. But there's multiple contributions that I think archaeology can make, even in periods that have good documentation. So it probably won't come as a surprise to know that in many historic periods, we get very partial records of what went on.
[00:11:30.03] We tend to get records written by certain people in society from certain perspectives. And we have lots of people, like people who are enslaved, sometimes women, sometimes children, whose voices don't appear in the historical record. And so what archaeology can do is help give voice to some of those people.
[00:11:48.80] We also, in the historic record, in the documentary record, have a bias towards big events, the Pueblo Revolt being admittedly one of those big events. But one thing archaeology can do is give us insight into the daily lives of people. In many areas, people don't record the minutia of their daily lives and archaeology can provide a window into that in ways that textual analysis just can't do.
[00:12:18.12] So what I'm going to talk about tonight is my attempts to do historical archaeology in a period, sometimes aided by documents, sometimes not aided by documents. But I do think that-- I hope that the study I'm going to give you is going to make people think that historical archaeology is a valid endeavor. It labors under the title the handmaiden to history.
[00:12:40.73] A lot of people think that historical archaeology can only tell us what we already know. So the phrase has been that historical archaeology is a really expensive way to tell us what we already know. I'm hoping to show you tonight that actually it can add a little bit more than just what we already know.
[00:12:54.85] So I'm going to take you out to where I do my research in New Mexico. So the pueblos of New Mexico, there are 19 pueblos in New Mexico today, scattered up and down the Rio Grande. 21 pueblos in total, which includes the Pueblos of Zuni out here and Hopi out in northern Arizona. For those of you who have never been to the pueblos, here's a picture of the north house at Taos Pueblo.
[00:13:26.03] And this is pretty much what we think pueblos would have generally looked like at the time of first contact with Europeans. The term Pueblo is a label that was given to these people by the Spaniards when they came up into this area and it just meant basically the town dwelling people. So these were the sedentary agriculturalists and they use that term Pueblo to differentiate them from the nomadic natives, the modern day Navajo, Apache, and Utes, who would have lived around the edges.
[00:13:58.68] And there was also an implication of they were the civilized Indians, as compared to the barbaric hunter gatherers. So these are the pueblos today. For anybody who's been to the area, here's Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico here. The modern city Albuquerque is in between Isleta and Sandia Pueblo is down here.
[00:14:16.27] And I work with Jemez Pueblo, out here to the west. And I'll get back to that in a little while and give you a little more about that area. So as Jeff mentioned, I used to work for Jemez Pueblo, and all of my research is conducted in collaboration with the Pueblo. So the research questions that I devised for this project really I did coming up hand in hand with people from the Pueblo.
[00:14:41.40] I had a staff of interns and employees that I trained in archaeology that worked with me in the field. And I made regular presentations and did site visits with the members of the tribal council and what they call their cultural resource advisory team. And I still continue in this relationship with Jemez. I'm working on a new research project now, but still working with all the same folks.
[00:15:05.31] And I would make regular presentations every couple months to report to this committee about what I was doing. This here is the tribal symbol for the Pueblo. Walatowa is their name for the home village that they live in today. And these are a couple of my interns, Marlon Magdalena, who went on to a career in archaeology, he now works at the Jemez State Monument in Jemez Springs, which is a 17th century mission site. He's one of the Rangers there.
[00:15:31.74] This is Gorman Romero. He went on to play semi-pro baseball, which was probably a much smarter career move, certainly more lucrative than archaeology. And again, just to give a little context here, this is what the pueblos largely look like today. This is Zia Pueblo, which is right down the road from Jemez. And you see here that there's a central plaza, this is characteristic of evolved modern pueblos.
[00:16:01.55] That's kind of the center of daily life and largely ritual life. They live in these apartment style room blocks clustered around the plaza. And you can see in the back here two circular structures. These are their kivas, which are their religious chambers where religious activity is carried on.
[00:16:18.92] In the prehistoric past, these were generally subterranean. Today, they tend to be above ground. And in the Rio Grande Pueblos, they are characterized by what anthropologists call moietal social organization, which means that, in the village, everybody belongs to one side or the other. There are two sides, there's kind of two teams in the pueblo.
[00:16:40.92] So at Zia, their moieties are the turquoise moiety and the wren moiety, so you're born into one of these moieties. And when people dance traditional dances, they will dance with the rest of the people in their moiety. So much of the activity in the pueblo is broken up along these lines of one side or the other.
[00:16:59.30] This is the 17th century Spanish mission that was built at Zia that was burned and destroyed in the revolt and then rebuilt we think in the same spot after the Pueblo Revolt. Back up to-- whoops, I don't want to do that-- back up to Jemez, there we go. This thing's still not working.
[00:17:25.68] This is the valley in which I work around Jemez Pueblo. So you can see it's a high desert climate. In prehistoric times, the villages that the Jemez lived in were on these mesa tops, for the most part. They didn't live down in the valley bottom. The Jemez were the mountain people we like to say.
[00:17:44.13] And it's actually on the flanks of a dormant volcano. This is the volcanic caldera. You can see the edges of it over here. And so what you actually see here is volcanic tufts of volcanic ash that was laid down. And they tended to build their pueblos on the tops of these mesas.
[00:18:00.18] So to give you an overall view of the whole area, here's Santa Fe over here. And this is where Jemez Pueblo is today. And I was just showing you a shot looking up this valley here. So it's an area of high mesas bisected by these steep canyons.
[00:18:16.00] And on the eve of Spanish contact, there would have been about 10 to 12 large pueblo villages dotting the tops of these mesas with populations as high as maybe 2,000 people living in each of those villages. So here's a reconstruction of what one of those larger villages would have looked like. So again, 10 to 15 of these scattered across the top.
[00:18:34.71] And they made a distinctive type of pottery that we call Jemez as black-on-white pottery. So generally, when we find these large pueblos with lots of Jemez black-on-white pottery in here, we tend to think that these were the places that Jemez people were living between about 1300 and when the Spaniards appear right around 1600.
[00:18:52.13] I mentioned before that volcanic caldera, you can see the collapsed caldera here. And so these are all the flanks of that structure. So there is only one village at Jemez today and this is a result of Spanish contact. When the Spaniards come in, they establish this mission village and they pull the people in from the settlements dotting the tops of the mesas.
[00:19:17.14] And this was a policy that Spaniards implemented in various places called either congregacion or reduccion. And in Jemez, they were successful in reducing the population all the way down to one main village. Here's what these villages look like today if you were to walk the landscape here.
[00:19:34.67] So you can see how lush it is on the tops of some of those mesas in distinction to the valley bottom. And these are all mounds of collapsed room blocks, so this is that structure that I was just showing you. All those rooms lay underneath it here.
[00:19:48.90] This is the ancestral Jemez village of Kwastiyukwa. We actually did survey here last summer. This is one of the largest of the Jemez villages. And for those of you who know your southwest archaeology, the scale of this site is big enough that Pueblo Bonito would fit right here if you put it in there. So this is a large village, thousands of people living there.
[00:20:13.08] Come on, there we go. Just to review your New Mexico state history, for those of you who aren't up on that, the colony of New Mexico is established in 1598. First contact in New Mexico comes in 1539, but for the first 60 years, there are only occasional temporary forays, including the Coronado Expedition. This is Coronado depicted here coming up to take Pecos Pueblo.
[00:20:41.63] But it's in 1598, when the Spaniards established the first permanent colonies and missions along the northern Rio Grande among the people that they called Pueblos. And in 1610, they established their colonial capital at Santa Fe. So on the eve of colonization, archaeological estimates are that there were around 100 different Pueblo villages in what's now New Mexico and Arizona at that time. Somewhere between 80 and 100, I think closer to 100 is probably more accurate.
[00:21:16.00] But of course, when we get permanent villages and we get the livestock that the Spaniards bring with them, we also get introduced diseases. So we have multiple accounts of measles, smallpox, and typhus epidemic sweeping through the pueblos in the first 80 years of colonization. So estimates at the high end suggest that possibly up to 80% of the populations lost during that period, on the lower end, at least 50% percent.
[00:21:47.35] But if we look at just in terms of sheer number of sites between 1600 and 1675, we go from about 100 pueblos down to 45. And then from there after the revolt, we're down to the 21 that we have today. So you can see the effects of disease just by the sheer numbers here.
[00:22:08.10] But that wasn't the only thing the Spaniards brought with them. I mentioned earlier they also had a policy of taxation that was implemented, in which they basically seized the Pueblo's stores of corn that they had stored up for years of drought. And the Spaniards are so effective in this that within the first decade, they managed to invert the subsistence economy.
[00:22:29.81] And when I say that, what I mean is when the Spaniards arrived, they're dependent on the Pueblos for food. They're asking the Pueblos to give them corn and other foodstuffs. By 1607, 1608, there are reports that the Pueblos are now coming to the Spaniards for food because the Spaniards have taken all those stores. They're storing them in the missions and they're using the missions as centers for redistribution for the native people.
[00:22:51.60] So the rates of taxation were exorbitant, to say the least. Add to that this establishment of missions, they were Franciscan missionaries in New Mexico, starting in 1598. This is the mission at Jemez Springs, just north of Jemez Pueblo, that was established in 1601 and only ran to probably 1639. But you can see the absolutely massive structure that they build here.
[00:23:23.21] Along with their evangelization policy was intolerance for traditional Pueblo religion. So there was an active program by the Franciscans to stamp out the native religion that included things like back filling the kivas, banning traditional dances. And there are reports of them burning ritual paraphernalia, including kachina masks and other paraphernalia. In one famous incident, they reported burning 1,600 kachina masks in one fell swoop.
[00:23:52.97] They also periodically rounded up people that they labeled hechiceros, which are roughly sorcerers would be the translation. But most people today would refer to them as the medicine men or the priests of the Pueblo. They did this multiple times, but the most famous event was in 1675 when they rounded up 47 of these accused sorcerers.
[00:24:14.06] They publicly whipped them in the plaza at Santa Fe, imprisoned most of them, sent others into slavery in the silver mines of northern Mexico, and executed four of them by hanging them in the plazas of four different pueblos in the north and south of the Rio Grande area. One of the medicine men who was captured in that sweep was a man from San Juan Pueblo name Po'pay He was whipped. And when he was released from prison, he left Santa Fe and went all the way north to Taos Pueblo, which is still the northernmost pueblo, and so it was really at the outer edges of the Spaniards' grasp.
[00:24:57.19] And once there, Po'pay went into retreat in a kiva, where he reportedly was visited by three spirits that had glowing eyes and the power to shoot fire from their fingertips. And these spirits delivered to Po'pay a prophecy. They instructed him that there was a way that he could bring about rejuvenation of the world, bring back renewed health for his people, and abundant crops would reappear. But in order to bring this about, they had to purge their world of the Spaniards and all their influences.
[00:25:29.45] So Po'pay begins to coordinate this revolt by an ingenious mnemonic device. I forgot to mention before that the Pueblos today speak six different languages. And at the time of Spanish contact, there were seven different languages being spoken. So one of the obstacles to earlier attempts at revolt-- and there were earlier revolts before the Pueblo Revolt-- is that they were not coordinated among Pueblos. It was individual villages rising up one by one.
[00:26:04.21] So what Po'pay is able to do is get a message to all the different pueblos, that they're all going to rise up on the same day. And the way he does this is by tying knots in a cord with the instructions that they're supposed to untie one knot each day. And on the morning that the last knot is loosed, everybody's to rise up in unison and attack the Spaniards in their midst.
[00:26:23.59] And he sends runners out to all the different Pueblo villages, they spread this message. In fact, two of the runners get picked up carrying one of these two days before the revolt. So the Spaniards find out that this is about to go down. But the Pueblos are coordinated enough that they also get a second word out that says, OK, we're doing it tomorrow. And on August 10th, 1680, this is what they do.
[00:26:43.26] So I mentioned before, we get this coordinated-- this is-- I should mention, sorry, this is a statue of Po'pay that was erected and put into the National Statuary Hall in the US Capitol building in 2005. Each state gets two representatives in the Statuary Hall and New Mexico only had one, so they decided put Po'pay in as the other.
[00:27:05.08] There was actually a lot of controversy about this because many in the Hispano community in New Mexico didn't think that Po'pay was an appropriate figure. But the statue was actually carved by an artist at Jemez Pueblo named Cliff Fragua, and I'll come back to that in my conclusion. So on August 10th, 1680, the Pueblos rise up in unison.
[00:27:28.02] And in fact, they kill 401 Spanish settlers, including 22 Franciscan priests, which is 2/3 of the ecclesiastical force in New Mexico at the time. The survivors of the revolt, around 1,000 people, hole up in the governor's palace in Santa Fe. And there's a nine day siege in which the Pueblos surround the governor's palace and there are numerous skirmishes back and forth.
[00:27:55.02] The Pueblos manage to cut off the water supply going into the palace. And so the people inside-- the reports are their horses start dying, people are dying of thirst. So the Spaniards make one last desperate attempt to break out. And eventually, they move in a column down the Rio Grande.
[00:28:15.24] Whether or not the Pueblos are allowing them to move or whether it's their show of force is a matter of some debate. But in any case, the Pueblos are successful and the Spaniards move from Santa Fe to about 300 miles to the south to El Paso Del Norte, which is in modern day Juarez, Mexico. It's because it's on that side of the Rio Grande.
[00:28:37.89] And for the next 12 years, the Pueblos enjoy freedom in a land that's free of their colonial overlords. And this is a cartoon by a modern Zuni artist of the Zuni Indians victorious in revolt and literally thumbing their noses at the Spaniards who are running away down in the valley below, down here. So what we have a 12 year period where the Pueblos are free from colonial rule.
[00:29:04.04] And what we're told happened during that period, initially, is that Po'pay makes a tour of the pueblos and he instructs everybody that they are to get rid of all the Spanish influence in their world and go back to their traditional ways of life. So the Spaniards capture people on their way down to El Paso and they interrogate them. And one of them says that Po'pay-- the words out of Po'pay's very mouth were that the people are to smash and burn the images of the Holy Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, the crosses, and everything having to do with Christianity, to burn the churches and smash the bells, and that in this way, they would return to live as they head in ancient times.
[00:29:44.02] So we're told that this is what Po'pay tells everybody that they're supposed to do. Now as I mentioned in 1692, the Spaniards are going to come back. And there's about a three year period of bloody battles as they're trying to reestablish control over the region. But when we read traditional histories of the Pueblo Revolt, and there are lots of them out there, what we typically get is the story leading up to the revolt and of those first days in Santa Fe, and then you'll literally turn the page and the next chapter will begin with the Spaniards coming back in 1692.
[00:30:17.28] So when we began this project, the question that we had was really what happened in between these years of 1680 and 1692. And this is where archaeology really helps to fill in some of these gaps. So what did happen? Let's take a look here.
[00:30:34.00] In the Jemez valley, people again are living at Jemez Pueblo by that time because they've been pulled down from their old traditional villages up here in the mesa tops. They're living here in Jemez and the first thing they do is kill the priest. This is an 18th century depiction of the priest at Jemez that was killed.
[00:30:53.96] Now this guy doesn't look particularly Jemez to me. And he's, in fact, carrying kind of an Aztec macana here, a war club, because the artist had never been to New Mexico himself. But this priest was very special. He was seen to be-- he was rumored to be kind of a clairvoyant priest.
[00:31:14.11] It was very important that the Spaniards remember him in later years. In fact, they exhumed his body from Jemez when they came back in 1692. After they kill the priest, the Jemez burn their own village down, including their own homes. So the question would be why would anybody do this. And my answer would be they're following Po'pay's call to expunge their world of Spanish influence.
[00:31:39.74] Remember, this is a village that was established by the Spaniards, not by Jemez themselves. So they would not have associated this with their traditional life before the Spaniards came. They associated this place exclusively with life in the missions under the Franciscans.
[00:31:52.87] So they burned the village, they burned the church, and they move about six miles to the north to a new Pueblo Patokwa, which is the first village that we went to study. Here is its location on this mesa. The white circle is where Patokwa is located.
[00:32:09.27] And just to give you a sense of scale, there's a house right down here and there's a water tower right back here. So that's the size of the mesa that they're in. And we think, in 1681, this is where they erected their new village. Now we mapped this village.
[00:32:25.84] The word Patokwa means village of the turquoise moiety. It's interesting. I'll come back to that in a minute, why it may be called that. But this is the map that we made.
[00:32:36.72] We used a surveyor's instrument called a total station to make a detailed topographic map of the site. All the data that I'm going to show you in here is of surface archaeology. We did not excavate for this project at all because that was the wishes of the Pueblo. Again, I'm collaborating with them and they, for lots of reasons, associate excavation with grave disturbance and they are not fans of grave disturbance.
[00:32:59.67] So we agreed from the beginning that all the work that I would do would be noninvasive. So the whole agenda of my project was to leave the sites exactly the same when we were done as they were when we got there. I'm lucky to work in more recent context, what some archaeologists would call current events, because I'm in the 17th century and we had incredible preservation.
[00:33:21.74] So you can see that we could see very clearly the outlines of the village here. This is the remains of a kiva here. On this north end, it's a little screwed up because somebody took a bulldozer in the 1950s and plowed through the north room block here. And that's because there's a persistent mission-- a persistent rumor at mission sites throughout the southwest that there are golden bells buried at these sites.
[00:33:43.87] There are not golden bells out there. The Spanish are trying to extract gold, not bring it out to these places. So please, don't go digging up anymore sites looking for golden bells because it really screws us up. There is a mission church that was built in the corner after revolt period. I'll come to that at the end of the talk here.
[00:34:02.12] So this is me working the total station, just to give you an idea of how we did it. And when you're on the surface at Patokwa, I'll be the first to admit that it is not much to look at. It has been described to me as piles of rocks. Then again, that's what archaeologists like, are piles of rocks.
[00:34:17.93] But this wasn't the only technique we use. We also used ground penetrating radar, which you see here. These are some of Larry Conyer's students our of the University of Denver that came out and were doing a radar study. So based on that surface map that I made and the ground penetrating radar, we were able to make this reconstruction of what we think Patokwa would've looked like between 1681 and 1693-- 1692, when the Spaniards come back.
[00:34:45.10] My estimates are that, initially, there were probably about 700 people that were living here. You can see two kivas in each of the plazas and a good size little pueblo at the time. Now we know that not everybody who built that village remain there. And that in 1683, a group broke off.
[00:35:07.89] Is my arrow going? Not yet. There we go. And built a second village called Boletsakwa, which translates to something like Pueblo of the abalone shell, on a higher mesa even farther away. We know this happened in 1683 because we have tree ring dates from the roof beams in this village, from excavations that take place in 1960 by the Girl Scouts no less. Yeah.
[00:35:36.10] And they all cluster around the year 1683. There are a couple that are 1680 and 1681, but there's a whole bunch that come out with cutting dates of 1683. And this jives with an account that the Spaniards later hear that there was a Ute raid during this period on the Jemez. And so it may have been that part of the group living at Patokwa felt that that site was no longer safe and they wanted to build a different pueblo.
[00:36:01.83] There were actually joined by people from Santo Domingo Pueblo, which is on the other side of the mountains here. And this is the map that we made of Boletsakwa, again, using the same techniques. This one had a little better preservation. There are many walls that are still standing on the surface. So all the black lines you see here are walls that you can still see standing and the empty lines are where we're inferring there have been walls-- there were walls underground.
[00:36:26.28] You can see a kiva out here. This is one of the places that the Girl Scouts excavated. And they left it open, so we can still see the walls there. And then this one appears in the reconstruction, but I had a longstanding debate with the students who worked with me and with my advisor about was there a kiva there, wasn't there a kiva there. I, in fact, thought there wasn't a kiva there. I just thought it was a natural dip.
[00:36:46.88] But a couple years ago, to solve this problem, we had a student named Jenny Stern out of the University of New Mexico, who came out with us and ran radar over that spot. And a right over this spot, that's one of the radar reflections we got back. Now here's the other ones.
[00:37:01.90] I will admit that ground penetrating radar is the Rorschach test of archaeology. We look at these and you got to kind of squint to see what you get. But to get a circular signature, this is probably a tree root going across right here. This is about as good as you're going get if you get this round anomaly right in the middle, right where we saw this little dip here.
[00:37:21.17] Again, I haven't been able to ground truth that we haven't been able to excavate it. But I'm told by those who know more about radar than I do that there is very likely a circular masonry subterranean structure in that area, which where I work, is called kiva. So I'm pretty sure there is a kiva under there.
[00:37:42.32] If we look at these sites, there are some similarities, not only in these two sites, but in some of the other villages that are built during the revolt period in other areas of the Rio Grande. One pattern that we see repeatedly is that they built these new pueblos directly next to, adjacent to, earlier villages from the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries. The remains of these villages would have been as conspicuous, if not more conspicuous, to the people at that time, as they are to us today.
[00:38:10.70] So they're just like us, walking over there, seeing the pottery, they're seeing the walls of these villages. And at the time of the revolt, I think what they're doing here is not only going back to the ways that their ancestors lived, but they're going back to the places that their ancestors lived. And this is not a simple matter of expedience and stone robbing, that they're just going out because, in this case, for example, they use different materials in the earlier village than they did in the 1680 structure.
[00:38:36.17] So this one is cut sandstone and these ones are unshaped river cobbles. You can see and old kiva depression in that part. In this one, there was some stone robbing as well, but I think they could have built this right on top. I just think it's not a mistake that they're putting this directly next to. We see a similar pattern with the people at Cochiti Pueblo, and also at Zuni when it happens with the new village out there.
[00:39:02.05] You also might notice-- this is really getting annoying. There we go. That the shapes of these two villages are actually very similar. So you see they both have two plazas, two kivas, bisected by a central room block. Not all of the Jemez Pueblos look like this. So I showed you that prehistoric Pueblo at the beginning of this presentation that had room blocks going all over the place.
[00:39:26.93] And in fact, another Pueblo that I just mentioned, Old Cochiti, which is about maybe 10 miles as the crow flies from these villages, also dual plaza, two kivas, central room block bisecting it in the center. So there's a pattern going on here. What the meaning of this is is up for debate, but I think what we're seeing here is an emphasis on duality, on the two halves.
[00:39:53.47] I talked about the moieties earlier. At Jemez, the moieties are the pumpkin and turquoise. There we go. So if you go to a feast day at Jemez and you see the two sides dancing, you'll see the turquoise side come out first, with their bodies, the men's bodies painted, followed by the pumpkin side dancing. And I think that's what they're doing here, is emphasizing that this is the Pueblo way to do things.
[00:40:21.41] Now in some places in the Pueblo world, you could make the argument that that's going back to the ways of the ancestors and that this was the traditional Pueblo way of doing things. And in fact, in Po'pay's home village of San Juan Pueblo, we have archaeological evidence for moiety structures going deep into prehistory. At Jemez, however, there is not evidence for moiety structures going back.
[00:40:47.37] And when I presented this evidence to the Cultural Resource Committee that I worked with, they began talking in their native language Tewa. And they said, yeah, we think this village is where we first got the other side. Now which side was first and which came later depends on who you ask, because the people in the pumpkin say they were there first and the turquoise came, and people in turquoise say they were there first and then the pumpkin came.
[00:41:13.65] But in any case, we do know that Boletsakwa is where those people from Santo Domingo Pueblo, a Keres speaking Pueblo from across the mountains, lived with the Jemez. And their oral history is that moietal structure was introduced to them by their neighbors across mountains at some point in the past. And so, I think what we see here is an example of what anthropologists like to call the invention of tradition, where Po'pay is telling people to go back to the ways of the ancestors, but in fact, what's being mobilized is what Po'pay thinks the ways the ancestors were, not necessarily what the Jemez people experienced as the ways of their ancestors.
[00:41:51.12] I have other examples of this and you can read about in the book, if you really want to read it. Again, the goal of this project was to look at what actually went on in this period in between and not to rely exclusively on what we knew from the little bits of the Spanish documentary record. Clearly, according to the documents, the Pueblos were supposed to purge all the Catholic influence at this time. And we see, in the historical record and in the archaeological record, evidence that churches were desecrated during this time, the bells were smashed.
[00:42:25.28] In almost every case, the bells were essentially the alarm clocks of the Pueblos. And the first thing they did when they got their hands on those things was to rip them down and smash holes in them. Many of the churches are burned. There are statues that are whipped, the paint is peeled off of them, the eyes are gouged out of paintings.
[00:42:44.71] So there was a lot of anti-Catholic fervor that occurred at this time. But in other pueblos, that didn't happen. So at Santo Domingo Pueblo, the Spaniards find the church is fully intact, the doors are closed, all the hangings are still on the wall, the chalice and the monstrance are still in place. The only thing they've done is they dug a grave at the base of the altar and had three priest bodies that were put into it.
[00:43:17.87] So actually, what we see is incredible variation across the Pueblo world. Some rejected the Spanish influence and some did not reject it. And I would argue, some utilized it in interesting other ways. So this is a piece of rock art from inside a cavate in Bandelier National Monument, for those of you who've been out there. A cavate is the back room of a pueblo that gets carved into a cliff.
[00:43:44.92] In this room in particular, they were grinding corn in there. You can see two metate bins and the marks on the wall where women's heels would have rubbed against the wall while they ground their corn. And the pottery from this area all dates to the Pueblo Revolt period. So as early as the 1940s, people had identified this series cavates as being occupied during the revolt, actually reoccupied. So they were almost certainly established earlier, reoccupied during the revolt.
[00:44:11.87] And what we see in that cavate is this curious image here, which looks very similar to 17th century Spanish colonial depictions of the Virgin Mary. So you got this kind of halo around the top, the eyes and the nose are in a very European style, I would say. It's got this veil possibly going around the outside. But curiously, the mouth is depicted as Pueblo people depicted kachina masks. So that's a very classic Pueblo characteristic.
[00:44:51.10] So you see here, the sun kachina from a petroglyph that was right in the immediate vicinity of Bandelier Cochiti reservoir, which also has a similar spiky crown, but this is a prehistoric image. So what's going on here? Po'pay tells everybody you're supposed to get rid of all the Catholic influence. So if we weren't doing the archaeology, we wouldn't think that we'd find images like this in a cavate during this post revolt period.
[00:45:22.69] But I also don't think that we should be too quick in making an easy interpretation that this is an example of the persistence of Catholicism because this image is not surrounded by images of crosses, or Christian fish, or any of the other images we would normally associate with Catholicism. In fact, what it's surrounded by are all these very traditional Puebloan images of kachinas, which you see here and here.
[00:45:50.77] This is a Koshare, or a clown. They have a very special ritual role. For those of you that have been out to the pueblos, they're in these black and white stripes. You'll see them up on the feast days patrolling the grounds to make sure nobody's taking pictures because Pueblos don't like people taking pictures when they're having their ceremonies. And more kachinas-- so I argue that this image is probably not an example of the persistence of any kind of straightforward Catholicism.
[00:46:17.52] But in fact, we you see here is the Pueblos taking Mary into their own pantheon. And so this is kind of the Virgin kachina. They are making Mary into a kachina. So they may not have done exactly what Po'pay instructed them to do, but what I think is going on is that they're taking the symbols of their colonizer and really mobilizing them for their own purposes.
[00:46:40.13] And this fits right in with what Po'pay did by banding all the Pueblo people together. Prior to the Spaniards appearance in the southwest, it's not at all apparent that the Pueblo people would have thought of themselves as Pueblo people, as a unitary group. It's the Spaniards who put that label on these people who would have previously identified according to their home villages or maybe their language groups.
[00:47:05.01] But Po'pay is able to take that Spanish notion and marshal that for the power of the revolt, to bring everybody together to bring about the revolt. So I think you see a similar process going on in this cavate. But it wasn't to last, and in 1692, the Spaniards reappear on the scene led by General Diego de Vargas, who comes back to recolonize New Mexico.
[00:47:35.21] This is a jar that's actually on display in the British Museum in London by a modern artist named Diego Romero, he did that opening slide that I had here as well. And his depiction of de Vargas, you can see here, it says 1692, Don Diego de Vargas, most feared of all the ruthless invaders, plots the righteous conquest and colonization of the Pueblo Indians. He is Pueblo, Diego Romero is Pueblo himself. And he does this very comic book style often dealing with the Pueblo role.
[00:48:05.30] But what I think I like most about this is he's archaeologically accurate because you can see back here a mesa with the pueblo on top. And this is exactly the structures that we see during the revolt period with people going up to the mesa tops in defense of the Spaniards which are coming back. So in 1692, the Spaniards reappear.
[00:48:27.23] Now we know that the Jemez are living in these two villages, because in 1692, and again in 1693, Vargas visits these villages. He gives us a description of the villages. He tells us how long it is from Jemez Pueblo. And so this is how we were originally able to locate the villages that dated to the revolt period, was because he'll say we walked four leagues to this village and then it was six leagues.
[00:48:49.07] A league is essentially a measure of distance that's roughly equivalent to how far you you'd walk in an hour. And so we put this into a GIS program and plotted all out all the references to all these villages, because he doesn't use the native names of the villages. And then, we're able to triangulate and figure out, OK, when he comes there in June of 1692, he's talking about Patokwa, and then he probably goes over to Boletsakwa.
[00:49:14.78] So we do have written descriptions of what these villages look like and they are dual plaza villages that are bisected by a central room block. When Vargas visits-- actually, the first time is pretty entertaining. He appears at the edge of the mesa and he says he's met by 500 Jemez warriors who are dressed in all their finery, giving war whoops. And one of his generals starts to approach the village and the Jemez warriors start throwing dirt in his face.
[00:49:47.19] And he actually speaks Tewa, so he says to them, hey, hey, calm down. We're coming back, but it's not going to be like it was before. Things are going to be better. And the report is that the Jemez warrior who was instigating this says to him, oh, no, this is the way we greet all our finest visitors. We throw dirt in their face.
[00:50:05.65] Vargas encourages them to move back to their mission pueblo and reestablish the village that they left earlier. And the Jemez say, OK, thank you very much, we'll take that under advisement. Vargas actually leaves, goes back to El Paso, and comes back in 1693. Jemez are still living here, they still haven't move down.
[00:50:25.37] He says I really think you guys should move down. They say, OK, thanks. He leaves again. And in the summer of 1694, because the Jemez have not left and moved back to the mission village, he announces in the plaza at Santa Fe that he's going to march on the Jemez in order to bring them back to their home village. And this follows an earlier raid in April on Old Cochiti, that third village that I showed you before.
[00:50:53.22] When you make a public announcement like that in Santa Fe and Pueblo runners are legendary in their ability to cover long distances in short amounts of time. It's almost sure that that word got to the Jemez far before Vargas and his troops manage to march all the way down the Rio Grande and then up the Jemez River into Jemez. And even before that time, we know that people from both Patokwa and Boletsakwa left their villages and built a new village in an even more defensible location on top of a mesa top called Astialakwa.
[00:51:30.55] The name Astialakwa translates to something like grinding stone lowering place. And I'll come back to why I think it has that name in a minute. But people like to draw comparisons between Masada, in Israel, and Astialakwa. This is kind of the last stand of the Jemez people here. They built this village in a period of less than eight months. And we know that from the documents, because Vargas is down here.
[00:51:57.57] This picture I've actually taken from the plaza at Patokwa looking up at the mesa that Astialakwa is on here. And Vargas visits there in November of 1693, the people are all still living there. This is, again, when he says I really think you guys should come down to the village. They say OK. He leaves, he comes back in July of 1694, and everybody's on top of the mesa.
[00:52:18.21] So this is something that is rare in archaeology. Most archaeologists are happy if they can date a site to a 200 year span. And I've got it down to eight months here. So this is what you can do with historical archaeology, I'd say.
[00:52:31.71] These are the remains at Astialakwa. So you can see incredible preservation. It's basically as if the village was already excavated for me. You can see the walls of many of the room blocks are still standing up to a meter in height. And so we mapped this village.
[00:52:49.68] This is in the early heyday of digital cameras. I had a four megapixel digital camera with a remote control that cost me like $1,200. And anyway, we put it up on this photo bipod and we'd snap a picture, slide it along, and snap a second picture, slide it along, and snap a third picture. And then we could use some photo stitching software to stitch those together and we'd have these low level aerial views.
[00:53:12.84] Nowadays, we're doing this with little helicopters and drones. We mapped a site this summer using a drone to do the same thing. So we're able to take pictures of each one of these rooms and throw it into a computer program and model that. And this is the reconstruction that we come up with. So it's a very different village than what we saw in those two early ones, these very compact plaza oriented pueblos.
[00:53:40.46] This one has very scattered room blocks. There is a plaza over here on the west side. And this is-- just to put it in context-- the mesa top. So you can see a wash that runs through the middle right here. And then there are room blocks and the east and room blocks on the west. But you can see just how defensive this mesa would have been.
[00:54:02.58] So again, to compare these structures, you got the two earlier villages in the 1680s, and then this one, totally different form, in the 1690s.
[00:54:12.27] Where are the kivas?
[00:54:13.82] There are no kivas up there. Now they're only up there for eight months, if that, and they're right on top of bed rock here. It was a hard place to dig a kiva. But that said, none of the structures on the top have a large enough floor area that I would feel comfortable suggesting they're any kind of communal gathering place.
[00:54:35.32] So, what's going on? Either they're practicing their practices either out in the open or up in farther places up the mesa, or they're going back down to Patokwa and using the kivas down there, even while they're living up top. They had to be running up and down the mesa because they have to get water down there, so it's not inconceivable that they would be down there.
[00:54:58.93] We do know when Vargas marches on them, he's in the valley the night before, and he hears drums and dancing coming from the top. And so they're probably dancing the plaza in preparation. But I'll get back to that story in a second.
[00:55:14.51] So very different layout, no kivas, very dispersed, so the question is what's going on here. Well, when we look at the walls, especially at Boletsakwa, but the few that we can see at Patokwa too, what we see is a pattern of bonding that suggests that these villages were all laid out at one time. So there was some notion of-- oh, that's my daughter in the back, so I can't really a mad at her for making a little noise.
[00:55:43.71] So there's some coordination of effort here where they're laying down the long walls and then building shorter walls in the middle, so there has to be at least some communal level of organization and possibly centralized leadership. When we get up to Ascialakwa, we see the opposite. Even in these along roadblocks up here, what we actually see is two to four room suites being built, often with walls built right next to each other, double walls.
[00:56:08.83] So nobody is cooperating up there to get this done. It's as though it's each family for themselves throwing up their structure. And in fact, if you were going to do a rational economic model, if you want to throw up a defensive pueblo really, really fast, it should look exactly like this. You'd coordinate your efforts, build a closed plaza oriented pueblo. And in fact, we get the opposite.
[00:56:30.41] So I think what we see happening, between the early 1680s, when these are built, and the early 1690s, is a breakdown of centralized leadership. We know that Po'pay was strong. And in fact, I can come back to that story later if you want to hear more details. We know that Po'pay is out of power by late 1681.
[00:56:47.66] He becomes a dictator, the Pueblos have enough of it, they kick him out. But there are other leaders who take over after that. But by 1690s, it appears that it's almost every person for themselves. So when people asked why the Pueblos weren't successful in holding the Spaniards at bay, I think that it may have to do with loss of the coordination that Po'pay was able to bring about in the early 1680s.
[00:57:14.37] So when you're on the mesa top, not just at the village, we see defensive structures built all over the place up there. So these are all the walls on the north end. These are piles of a river cobbles, mainly of granite, that were brought up to use in the slings that people were using because the Spaniards were going to march on them. And so we still find those piles of cobbles at the tops of trail heads that they would be raining down on them.
[00:57:40.77] And this is a nifty one. If you get behind this one, you can look through those holes and see the trail that comes up the mesa right there. So somebody could have used that as a little spy location. So on July 24th of 1694, Vargas comes up the valley.
[00:57:57.87] On the way, he stops at Zia Pueblo and picks up 50 Pueblo reinforcements who have flipped allegiances. They side with the Spaniards in this period. And so he gets to the base of the mesa and breaks into two halves. And the Zias and some Santa Ana people go around to the north end of the mesa and Vargas' forces come up the south end of the mesa. And they attack the pueblo and there's a day long battle.
[00:58:21.25] Some remnants, we find here. This is a piece of Spanish chain mail, we think. And this is burning evident in one of the rooms. You see this orange and then there's black plaster in there as well. So there's a battle that rages from dawn until about noon. 87 Jemez warriors are killed, including five people burned alive in their homes.
[00:58:47.50] Once the Spaniards manage to take the mesa top, they start going house by house, lighting the roofs on fire. And seven people who jumped off a cliff and died at the end of the battle. Vargas takes 387 Jemez women, elders, and children prisoner and brings them back down to Patokwa, which is located here.
[00:59:10.25] So here's the reconstruction I did overlaid in Google Earth, but you can see how defensive this mesa was. The way the Spaniards do this is the force is coming up this trail, which is the trail is still the same one I hike up when I go up there today, coming right up here. It's too steep for them to take their horses up and they're not able to breach the top here. Probably what happens is they're able to break through on the north end. Those people come in and hit the warriors in the back who are guarding this edge.
[00:59:41.82] And this is probably where we get the name Astialakwa, which again means grinding stone lowering place. The Spaniard report that the Jemez are showering absolutely everything they can get their hands on down on them as they come up this trail, probably including their grinding stones because they're looking for big rocks to throw down on their heads. And so my interpretation is that that name may come about because it's a reference to that's the place where we threw the grinding stones down at the Spaniards.
[01:00:11.06] At the end of that battle, again, as in the Spaniards are burning these rooms-- and we were able to determine that more than 80% of the rooms show evidence of this burning, some of them include burned corn. And after the battle, the Spanish took out all the corn that they could still use. So when we found burned corn up there, that was a good indicator that that room was burned during the battle and not after the fact.
[01:00:35.53] So some on the other side probably get up against this cliff, and this is where we have this legend about the seven warriors who jump. So there's been multiple versions of this oral tradition that have been recorded over the years. All of them agree that at least seven people jumped from the mesa edge. The Spaniards say that they find seven bodies in the valley below the next day.
[01:00:54.33] But the Jemez legend is that it didn't end there, that after those seven jumped, there was an apparition of either the Virgin or of San Diego, or possibly Santiago, who was the patron Saint of the Spanish army. And that once that saint appears, it allows the rest of the Jemez people to jump off the edge. And the phrase they use is they floated like butterflies into the valley below.
[01:01:18.76] So this sounds like a very nifty story about people jumping off the edge. And you can see, this is no small drop here. But after the battle, the Spaniards are up there for about two weeks cleaning out corn. And on the third day after the battle, there's a skirmish down below because a man has crawled out of the rocks on the south end of the mesa, he's reappeared on the mesa top, and his right shoulder is torn open and his right thigh is bloodied and wounded.
[01:01:47.41] And he begs for water, they give him water and they interrogate him. And this appears to be possibly a war captain who jumped off the edge, somehow survived that fall, although was damaged in that, and made it back to the top. The Spaniards, of course, interrogate him and then execute him. So that's the end of that.
[01:02:06.59] But this reconstruction shows what we think that Patokwa would've looked like after the Spanish reconquest, with the mission that goes up in the corner. But more importantly, the Spaniards tell us that they constructed a stone dais and that they put a cross on top of the dais in one of the plazas. And we find what we think are the remains of that dais in the middle of that plaza.
[01:02:31.02] But you see in the reconstruction, we've left the kiva there. Now before the Pueblo Revolt, there's no way the Spaniards would have allowed a kiva to function in the same courtyard or same plaza and directly next to a cross. Almost surely, they would've order that kiva filled, if not put the church directly on top of the kiva, which is a pattern that we see them do in multiple places. So this is evidence of some of the long term results of the Pueblo revolt, which really did result in a change in Spanish evangelical policy.
[01:03:01.14] I wouldn't exactly call it a kinder, gentler Franciscan world, but they certainly did not repress traditional religion in the same ways after the revolt that they did before the revolt. And so many Pueblo people look at that as one of the reasons why the Pueblos persist in the form that they do today. So let me wrap this up with some conclusions.
[01:03:23.54] So what are the lessons we can draw from the Pueblo Revolt? Well, the first one, you probably guessed from the title of my talk is I would really question narratives of American exceptionalism that see the American Revolution as some type of unique event. Not that we can't celebrate it, but only that there are parallels in many other places in terms of colonial revolution around the world, even in Native America.
[01:03:48.21] But maybe more than that, and this is what I talk about in my book a little bit, is the fact that it should really make us question religious exceptionalism. Because what we see in the pattern of Po'pay and his movement is what anthropologists call a revitalization movement. So this is where we get a charismatic leader who comes up from the masses, he develops a small following around him.
[01:04:10.32] These disciples spread a word to a larger group. And through this, they're able to bring about some intentional cultural change. And so I would argue that this pattern fits for early Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Mormonism. We all see these charismatic figures that come up and develop this following around them.
[01:04:31.57] So I mentioned before, the term anthropologists use is the revitalization movement. This was a term coined by Anthony F C Wallace in the 1950s to denote "A deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture through the rapid acceptance of a pattern of multiple innovations." So anthropologically these are famous-- the Ghost Dance of the Northern Plains, and there are countless other examples in Native North America that seem to fit the revitalization movement prototype.
[01:04:59.64] Cargo cults in the South Pacific that many of you have heard about from post World War II era, also many of those fit the revitalization movement model. Basically, what we think of as messianic, apocalyptic, nativists, revivalist movements, all of these fit into this larger model of revitalization. And I'd say Po'pay fits right in with those too.
[01:05:22.88] So to drive this point home one more time, if we consider the parallels between Po'pay and Jesus, both are itinerant prophet preachers who invade against a colonial regime. Both of them are taken prisoner and whipped by that regime, both advocate a return to traditional religion. Both of them, we really don't have records of their early life. They appear on stage and have a very short public life.
[01:05:54.16] All these parallels, I think, are not a coincidence, but are an artifact of the fact that we have very similar social processes going on in early Christianity, or in Mormonism, or in Buddhism, or in Islam, or insert your favorite religion here, and with Po'pay and the Pueblo Revolt. One of the major differences being some of Po'pay's reforms didn't carry through, but then, again, a lot of them did and really went on to structure Pueblo religion today.
[01:06:26.50] So if you want to read more about this, here's my shameless plug for my book, which is available on Amazon right now. I don't feel bad telling you buy it because I'm donating all the author's proceeds to cultural preservation at the Pueblo. So I don't make a dime off the book, it's all going to the pueblo. But if you're interested in getting it, there are flyers over there that will give you 20% off that were on the table. So you can grab one of those on the way out.
[01:06:52.21] And I'm going to finish up with this slide here that shows the statue of Po'pay when it was installed in the National Statuary Hall. And when they did this, there was this great little ironic twist that the location in which they chose to place Po'pay's statue was directly in front of a giant 18 foot tall picture of Columbus discovering, quotes, "the New World." But maybe it is apropos because you see that Po'pay has turned his back on Columbus and he's looking towards the horizon. So thank you for listening.
[01:07:22.66] [APPLAUSE]
[01:07:30.73] So I'm told we have a couple minutes for questions here, so-- yeah, please. Let me ask two questions. If this is a religious revolt, as it was called, led by Po'pay, why haven't-- I'm puzzled that in the myths about the guys jumping off the cliff, you didn't refer to a Indian or a Pueblo religious figure, that you referred to kind of a-- this legend is in terms of the Christian religion that's supposedly there. So why aren't they rejecting? So I'm puzzled by that. The other thing I'm puzzled by, or another thing I'm puzzled by-- I'm easily puzzled-- the first villages that were constructed by the new order of those dozen years were not on the mesa tops.
[01:08:37.92] They were actually.
[01:08:39.19] Oh, they were on the top?
[01:08:39.89] Yeah, one was just a lower part of the mesa, but it was on a mesa top. It's in there. And the second one was actually on a very high mesa top. Yeah, yeah.
[01:08:50.56] The last one had to be as high as possible because of--
[01:08:54.02] It was in the most inaccessible spot possible to probably build that village, yeah. But let me go back to your earlier question, which is-- the real answer is I don't know why that's the case. But I think it fits in with what we see in the archaeology, that we don't have the total [INAUDIBLE] of all the Catholic influence. What we see is it being reinterpreted in new ways.
[01:09:19.62] So I think what's going on here is the Pueblo people are, again, drawing on Catholic religion and saying we're going to take that in and we're going to find power in it for ourselves as well. And so that's my interpretation of why they're calling on those saints there. There are-- in fact, today, if you go to the mesa with people from Jemez, they can point to the spot on the mesa where they'll show you that's the apparition of the saint there, where they see on one side it appears to be possibly San Diego with a donkey, on the other side it appears to be the Virgin.
[01:09:52.47] So they point to that spot as evidence that this apparition formed there. But as to why it's not a traditional Puebloan figure, I don't know. There is rock art up there that's traditional Puebloan figures as well. Yeah, in the back.
[01:10:10.21] [INAUDIBLE]. I'm a [INAUDIBLE] student at the Kennedy School. My family and I are here. We're from Santa Clara. [INAUDIBLE].
[01:10:21.17] Thanks for coming, yeah.
[01:10:24.66] My question is, you know, most of the focus in your profession is that to not necessarily have the same kind of collaborative working relationship with tribes and in fact to [INAUDIBLE]. I wonder if you could talk a little about how that relationship actually came about. But also, I'd be interested to know what arrangements did you have with the Pueblo Jemez as to the extent of their support in the research you do and really complement you and commend on providing the profits to the book back. But what arrangements do you have with regard to the information that you get from the spot, what you can release, what belongs to them, in terms of the intellectual property associated with having constructed the sites?
[01:11:21.47] Sure, sure, thanks. So the first question was about how I got into this relationship with Jemez. So in fact, this museum plays a role in that process. Before I even got involved in archaeology, this is back when I was still working in South Dakota, the process of repatriation was taking place here between the Peabody and Jemez Pueblo, with human remains from Pecos Pueblo.
[01:11:48.56] This is the largest single repatriation, I'm sure many of you have heard about this before, when the Peabody returned 2,000 human remains that were excavated by AV Kidder in the 19-teens and '20s. And it was-- really, as a result of that, there was a desire on the part of Jemez and Phillips Academy in Andover to develop a relationship that was maybe not so acrimonious and there could be a partnership.
[01:12:17.38] And so they started a cultural exchange program, in which students from Phillips Academy come out to Jemez every year and students from-- and they see the sites, they live with a Pueblo family for a week, they see sites around Jemez. They go to Pecos, and then they all come back here, and the kids from Jemez may come here to the Peabody, they go to Phillips Academy.
[01:12:40.86] The short answer, I guess, to your question is just a lot of serendipity. I happened to show up requesting permission to do this work two weeks before the people from Andover were coming out and they didn't know what they were going to do with those kids. So they said, sure, why don't you take those kids out.
[01:12:56.94] And we sat down and talked about what we would do, and what was appropriate, and what would not be appropriate. And then at the end of that summer, I made a presentation to the Tribal Council, and you know, apparently, I didn't say too many incorrect things because they asked me to come back the next year and work with them. And then it was out of that that I developed a relationship where I worked for the tribe for a couple years and I continue to have this relationship with them.
[01:13:22.78] So it was really because of the law NAGPRA being passed in 1990 that forced museums and archaeologists to talk to native people finally. And it is not an easy process. And I am the first to acknowledge that archaeology has colonial history that is not pretty at times. But I see myself as trying to do my own small part to try and rectify some of those relationships in the past.
[01:13:51.60] As far as the information goes, everything that I presented today and everything in the book, I presented to the Pueblo before. They see all of my articles, have the chance to comment, tell me if there are things that they object to. We discuss that. It actually doesn't come up very often.
[01:14:09.08] But everything that I presented here, I present to them and I ask them is it all right if I present this in educational context and in the book, which the profits are going back to you, and they OK-ed all that. So I do talk about things with them. We don't have a formal agreement that says that they censor the information that I use or anything like that. Because people always ask me, well, what about when you get to something that they don't want you to talk about, and as of yet, we haven't hit that roadblock.
[01:14:38.38] I think, partially, because I know there are things that I know about these sites that I don't talk about publicly that people have told me, that I'm told that wouldn't be appropriate to share in these contexts. But before publication of the book, I sat down with them. We went through the whole thing, we went through the book proposal. I got letters of support from the governor at that time, and the Tribal Council. And then, at every stage, I went back to them and showed them how it was progressing.
[01:15:07.80] And then our current research project is really driven, in part, by tribal concerns. My new research project deals with human responses to wildfires in the past. And as someone from Santa Clara, you certainly know the problems we've had with wildfires in New Mexico in recent years. And so what we're trying to do is look at the long term impacts of wildfires in this area to better manage this part of the Santa Fe National Forest, so maybe we won't have some the same effects that have happened up near Santa Clara.
[01:15:39.16] And that research really came out of, again, sitting down with the Pueblo and-- so instead of it being me saying here's a research project, is this OK with you guys, it was them helping to drive the questions from the beginning. So I think it's a lot about communication and keeping yourself open. But I think a big part of it is archaeologists being willing to work from the areas that the Pueblo finds useful, rather than coming out with our own research agendas. And for me, it's opened up things that I would never have thought to research before, but that have been really fruitful in the end. I think we're out of time actually, but--
[01:16:17.62] Well, we are.
[01:16:18.39] I'll be at the--
[01:16:19.30] --over and hour so, let's take break. But you'll be available--
[01:16:22.49] At the reception, yes.
[01:16:23.62] For conversation at the reception. So we'll go ahead and thank him and--
[01:16:26.92] [APPLAUSE]
[01:16:29.32] Thanks.