Stanford University

Post-Doc, Anthropology

IHUM Postdoctoral Fellow

About

My ongoing research investigates the daily lives of indigenous peoples living in the California Spanish missions, 1769-1834. I have explored the ecological motivations for the relatively rapid incorporation of Native Californians into the Spanish missions, which was published in the journal Ethnohistory. More recently I have examined how displaced indigenous peoples negotiated identities during colonial moments. Within the missions lived Native Californians from assorted coalitions of villages who spoke various dialects of different languages. Faced with such cultural entanglement, I explore how indigenous peoples formed communities of daily practice out of which cultural and social identities may have emerged. Based on my archaeological and documentary analysis to date, I suggest that diverse indigenous people within some California mission communities created a shared identity. Social identities structured around each mission may have emerged out of, for example, shared communities of ceramic practice or intermarriage. However, a mission-centered identity may have been but one of many social identities situationally expressed.  For instance, many people living in the missions likely maintained connections to their ancestral communities while they simultaneously formed new colonial identities tied to a specific mission. Further, I argue that the shared participation in communities of practice within missions suggests that native peoples reinterpreted their identities with an indigenous sensibility. Just as in precolonial times, local Indians may have constructed social identities tied to place; in this historical moment, however, that place was a mission rather than a local coalition of villages. These ideas are expressed in articles in American Antiquity, The Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, and a forthcoming edited volume. 

As a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Davis, I continued my investigations of ceramic production and identity formation in the California Spanish missions. Seeking evidence to complement my petrographic studies of California mission ceramics, I experimented with electron microprobe analysis to further investigate variability in raw material selection and processing within and between  mission communities. I also expanded my database to compare ceramics from Spanish soldier and indigenous households, addressing how technological style may have varied between these different contexts. I conducted an ethnohistoric study of California Spanish Mission registries, which provides information about baptism, death, and marriage patterns as well as idiosyncratic behaviors such as whether a baptized individual died in the mission or traveled back to their home village before expiring. My analysis of JP Harrington’s 1920s ethnographic field notes on California Indians also informed my research on identity formation in the mission communities. For example, Harrington’s informant Ascencion Solórsano, suggests that the ethnolinguistically diverse Indian community at Mission San Juan Bautista – Yokuts and Costanoan/Ohlone peoples of various village coalitions and lineages were baptized at this mission – spoke a single indigenous language, “the Indian language of San Juan.” Inspired by some of my UC Davis colleagues, I also began working on a paper that presents a method for modeling subsistence in the California missions. Spanish missionaries introduced agricultural subsistence practices to largely hunting and gathering communities. While indigenous peoples adopted some of the subsistence practices, archaeological evidence suggests that agriculture was one facet of a much larger subsistence strategy. My research applies a behavioral ecology approach to model the optimal rates at which local peoples in the California Mission communities may have participated in both colonial and traditional subsistence practices. Instead of viewing missions as entry points of indigenous peoples into colonial society, I address the varied ways that native peoples incorporated the Spanish mission system into existing yet dynamic indigenous landscapes. I am currently drafting articles on this research and plan on submitting to Historical Archaeology, The Journal of Archaeological Science, and a forthcoming edited volume.

During my time UC Davis, I also began a new field project to address temporal and contextual bias in my previous research. My study of identity making among indigenous peoples in colonial California has been limited to archaeological materials, specifically ceramics, recovered from deposits associated with the adobe structures within which native peoples or colonists once lived. Such buildings were constructed at least a generation after the establishment of most mission communities, thus making the daily practices of the mission’s first residents absent from my sample. Also intriguing are historical documents that indicate early native households in many mission communities were constructed in an indigenous style. While such indigenous style households have occasionally been uncovered at different mission sites during the mitigation of construction, there has yet to be an archaeological investigation of a neophyte village complex. The goal of my current project is to identify and excavate the site of the Indian Village at Mission San Antonio de Padua. Using data obtained from the posthole survey I conducted this summer, I am currently applying for funding to expand the survey and conduct resistivity testing. I am also organizing a community-based field school at the site through UC Santa Cruz for the summer of 2012, working with undergraduates and members of the local Salinan Tribal Council to develop and execute project goals.