The Archaeology and History of Pueblo San Marcos brings archaeological science and demographic reconstruction to center stage to tell the story of a decidedly powerful place in the Galisteo Basin of New Mexico. The overarching goal of the volume is to elucidate the historical significance of Pueblo San Marcos and how it changed as the result of seventeenth-century Spanish missionization and mining. This study sets the gold standard for what we can learn from large unit pueblos in the American Southwest based almost entirely on surface assemblages and mapping. The enormous amount of data the contributors have collected further enable them to develop and test new methodologies, including luminescence and obsidian hydration techniques useful for dating colonial-era sites. The 15 highly focused chapters consider interrelated themes of protohistoric social organization, Pueblo-Spanish interactions, and population change.
The authors draw upon several classes of artifacts to evaluate shifts in social organization. Schleher examines the question of stability and change in communities of practice through an attribute analysis of the glazeware assemblage. She reveals that the organization of ceramic manufacture remained constant over time and that potters at San Marcos actively encouraged new learners to conform to production norms despite widespread social change. The organization of lithic production also remained consistent over time, as noted in Compton's analysis of the tool and debitage assemblage. The chapter by Ramenofsky, Steffen, Ferguson, LeTourneau, and Okum on obsidian sourcing likewise demonstrates how the use of local and regional lithic sources was unchanged, although the use of Valles Rhyolite, located 35 km away, increased dramatically during the mission period. Whether Pueblo residents procured Valles Rhyolite directly or through trade, it is clear that the Spanish could not completely curb the regional circulation of people and things, despite their interference in Plains-Pueblo exchange.
General analyses of the San Marcos artifacts by Larson, Schleher, Ramenofsky, Van Hoose, and Dyer illuminate elements of Pueblo-Spanish interactions. The authors suggest that the Spanish neither disrupted nor required major changes in traditional crafts. However, Spanish mining in the nearby Cerrillos Hills did disenfranchise potters from the very resources they needed to make ceramic glazewares. Flint's chapter argues that Spanish mining precipitated the termination of the glazeware tradition by the 1680s and that it was responsible for the shift from ceramic Glaze E to Glaze F in the early 1600s. Pueblo dispossession of the Cerrillos Hills removed an important source of turquoise in addition to the raw materials for ceramic production. Vaughan's chapter on Spanish metallurgy develops this theme by considering the manner in which Pueblo-Spanish mining relations involved numerous types of interactions. He shows that the documentary record cannot be reduced to a “simple one-dimensional analysis focused on slavery” and that the Spaniards were never a sizable or oppressive presence in the town. Instead, land appropriation and resource disenfranchisement were larger and more insidious processes leading up to the Pueblo Revolt.
Population change is the major focus of the final chapters. Ramenofsky uses ceramic frequency seriation, correspondence analysis, and mean ceramic dating to develop a temporal sequence of site middens. This work reveals five periods of occupation, shifting occupation, and episodic abandonments. Peak occupation occurred in the early 1400s, followed by a sharp decline in the late 1400s. Populations fluctuated during the 1500s but stabilized during the mission period. Ortman comes to a similar conclusion by applying uniform probability density analysis to a representative sample of pottery. The favorable comparison between his and Ramenofsky's methods demonstrates that ceramic approaches to demographic reconstruction using different analytical techniques can yield informative results. Still, some differences are evident. Ortman's distribution shows a steep decline in population during the mid-1400s, a short-lived rebound in the early 1500s, and a second precipitous decline in the late 1500s. His analysis yields a slightly later chronology as compared with Ramenofsky's.
Pinson's chapter offers a note of caution about using surface assemblages in population reconstructions without due consideration of how unit pueblos form and change. She argues that modern San Marcos is a sealed tell, and she demonstrates how complex sedimentary packages introduce systematic patterning to surface archaeological records that can affect population reconstructions. The point of this important discussion is that even the best analytical methods may underestimate the size of founding and peak populations. This in turn has a bearing on the magnitude of fluctuations in population reconstructions.
The New Mexico Book Co-op named The Archaeology and History of Pueblo San Marcos as the sole Anthropology/Archaeology recipient of the 2018 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. The volume introduces new methodologies to the study of population change, and it challenges long-held assumptions about the dynamic nature of large protohistoric pueblos, the people who occupied them, and the historical impacts of Spanish mining and missionization on the Native communities of the Galisteo Basin.
