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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[APPLAUSE]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where are the kivas?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[APPLAUSE]
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.
They were actually.
Oh, they were on the top?
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.
The last one had to be as
high as possible because of--
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.
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.
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.
[INAUDIBLE]
I'm a [INAUDIBLE] student
at the Kennedy School.
My family and I are here.
We're from Santa Clara.
[INAUDIBLE]
Thanks for coming, yeah.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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--
Well, we are.
I'll be at the--
--over and hour so,
let's take break.
But you'll be available--
At the reception, yes.
For conversation
at the reception.
So we'll go ahead
and thank him and--
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
