This work is a welcome addition to historical and anthropological works on the northern frontiers of New Spain that question tired binaries of “Spanish” and “Indigenous” and joins studies that focus instead on strategic, fluid, and cross-cutting identities along frontiers. “Indian,” “Hispano,” and even “Anglo” labels have been reified in ways unhelpful to community projects trying to gain political recognition or to the archaeological project of interpreting the multiple scales of cultural landscape—from household to valley—that Jun U. Sunseri assembles in this book. The setting is the village site of Casitas in the Rito Colorado valley in northern New Mexico. Sunseri's hard-won trust with village descendants allows him to pull apart, in a respectful and nuanced way, the history of how such sensitive and loaded ethnic categories (castas, Indios, Genízaros, vecinos, Españoles) were constructed, deconstructed, and manipulated by eighteenth-century village residents and then misapplied by colonial officials and, regrettably, some scholars. Words matter. People in the modern descendant community of El Rito still struggle for political recognition. Sunseri's work demonstrates that methodological rigor and political engagement are tandem, mutually reinforcing pursuits.
Sunseri begins Chapter 1 with an important question: “How do families make homes and community in a war zone?” (p. 1). He is describing the farthest-flung parts of northern New Spain where land grants came at the price of the “greatest sacrifices” born by the colony's “least privileged,” a mixed-heritage group of Genízaros, Indo-Hispano colonial captives/kin who often intermixed with Hopi and Tewa groups. Spanish authorities expected these families and villages to buffer more southerly settlements from raids by the Jicarilla and Plains Apache, Navajo, Ute, Comanche, or Pawnee—whichever groups the New Mexican governor at the time happened to be antagonizing as a matter of policy. Sunseri notes that during the 1700s, neither the colonized nor the colonizers were homogenous populations. Mixed identities allowed villagers to “mobilize different aspects of their heritages in making a home” (p. 28) and recruiting allies, creating the “situational identities” referred to in the title. Here, Sunseri confronts the particular challenges such fluidity poses for archaeology when it comes to largely undocumented spaces.
Chapters 1 and 2 discuss historical context and engagement with descendants. Chapter 3 begins his archaeological analyses at the scale of “homescape.” Sunseri's command of the middle-range potentials of geographic information systems (GIS), ground-penetrating radar (GPR), scanning electron microsopy, and other such research tools allows him to communicate the application of these technologies in a way that is elegant, clear, and readable to an advanced undergraduate. Too often, “whiz-bang” technologies drive research rather than serving as tools to make research more robust. Here, Sunseri triangulates resulting data to outline fluid identities strategically deployed by different site denizens. Situational identities are indeed difficult to “see” archaeologically, but these analyses go a long way towards illuminating patterns among village households and beyond. For example, he uses GIS analysis to demonstrate how mixed heritage residents of Casitas successfully cast a Spanish colonial veneer over an essentially indigenous irrigation system because the colonially prescribed one would not have worked on this landscape. This sidestepping of colonial rule is one example of the way villagers mobilized aspects of their heritage to negotiate or circumvent Spanish colonial mandates that proved unsuitable for local terrain. Sunseri makes a compelling case for such “sophisticated tactical and agricultural knowledge of people that is not reflected in the documentary record” (p. 81).
Sunseri introduces Chapter 4, “Hearthscape Tools,” with a trenchant folktale about women and girls greeting a raiding party with food when men are away, exemplifying entanglements of kinship and foodways. As the saying goes, “food is love,” and both serving vessels and the offerings they contain reinforce tenuous kinship ties with potentially dangerous Ute or Navajo visitors who may also be cousins. Sunseri provides a fine-grained look at ceramic assemblages, using materials sourcing, manufacture, and trade to map political and kin allegiances in the region and within the village. He links neighborhood differences in ceramics distribution to delicate decisions about affiliations within unstable geopolitics. His “food systems approach” in Chapter 5 moves from valley-wide livestock “on-the-hoof” through butchering to meat on the plate at the hearth. How meat was portioned and consumed and its distribution within the village are again related to complex local webs of alliance and affiliation. Highly technical data processing meets ethnographic storytelling with happy results.
In the last chapter, Chapter 6, Sunseri revisits the possibility of doing “archaeology of a place beyond labels,” his answer to the archaeological challenges of using material culture and built environments to illuminate past identities where those identities were unsettled and situational. The epilogue presents future avenues of research and a discussion of the politics of this work in the present, serving to reframe narratives and perhaps, in some cases, undo generations of shame associated with the fraught identity of Genízaro. The approaches of materials analysis and scale he applies in this work will provide rich comparative fodder for scholars grappling with such questions and datasets in other colonial settings and periods.
