Publication Date

3-28-1996

Abstract

This dissertation argues that some Hispanic villagers living in the frontier colony of New Mexico in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were engaged in pottery manufacture. Population growth and economic changes brought about conditions in which many Hispanics, when disenfranchised from productive farming and ranching, turned first to ceramic manufacture as an alternative strategy and eventually to ceramic craft specialization.

Archaeologists working with Spanish colonial, Mexican Republic, and territorial period sites in New Mexico and southern Colorado normally assume that the ceramics recovered from these sites were produced by Native Americans and acquired by trade. While this is true in many cases, it is not always so. On the contrary, the data presented in this research indicate that New Mexican Hispanics began to engage in ceramic specialization by 1790 and continued after 1890.

New Mexican archival, ethnohistoric, ethnographic, oral historical, and archaeological data are consistent with a model of ceramic craft specialization that was presented by Dean Arnold in 1985. Arnold shows that population pressure led disenfranchised individuals to move into craft specialization, especially pottery making.

The archaeological presence of Hispanic-made pottery and oral histories concerning pottery-making in Hispanic villages reveal the model's explanatory power when viewed in xi context of a colonial frontier. Finally, data presented in this dissertation will help researchers recognize Hispanic-made ceramics in the archaeological record of southern Colorado and New Mexico from 1790 to 1890.

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Anthropology

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Anthropology

First Committee Member (Chair)

Lewis R. Binford

Second Committee Member

James L. Boone

Third Committee Member

Wirt H. Wills

Fourth Committee Member

John L. Kessell

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