Labor, Society, and Family on Mexico's Caminos Reales, 1757-1804
Bruce A. Castleman
The importance of the silver trade to the Spanish colonial effort is well documented, as it opened up an exchange of goods with Europe and Asia. Lesser known is the story of the roads on which this trade moved and the people responsible for building them.
Focusing on the camino real linking Mexico City and the port of Veracruz, Bruce Castleman has written a social history of road construction laborers in late Bourbon Mexico. He has drawn on employment and census records to study a major shift in methods used by the Spanish colonial regime to mobilize the supply of unskilled labor--and concomitant changes in the identities those laborers asserted for themselves.
Through a close analysis of wages actually paid to named individuals from one week to the next, Castleman opens a new window on Mexican history. In the 1760s, a free-wage labor regime replaced a draft-labor system, and by examining records of road construction he traces both this transformation and its implications. During this time, free-wage artisans saw their earnings reduced, and they were pushed into the labor pool, and Castleman reveals how a shift occurred in the way that laborers identified themselves as the Spanish casta system of racial classification became increasingly fluid.
In his study, Castleman introduces some of the principal players of eighteenth-century Mexico, from viceroys to tobacco planters to military engineers. He then fleshes out the lives of working persons, drawing on a complete set of construction records from the construction of the Puente de Escamela at Orizaba to forge a collective biography that considers their existence apart from the workplace. By linking census and employment records, he uncovers a host of social indicators such as marriage preference, family structure, and differences over time in how the caste system was used to classify people according to ancestry.
As Castleman shows, roads did not so much link Mexico to the global economy as forge regional markets within New Spain, and his work provides an astute analysis of struggles between the Bourbon colonial state, the important consulados of Mexico City and Veracruz, and more localized interests over road policy. More important, Building the King's Highway provides a valuable new perspective on people's lives as it advances our understanding of labor in late colonial Latin America.
Bruce A. Castleman is a lecturer in history at San Diego State University.
April
184 pp., 3 halftones
6 x 9
ISBN 0-8165-2439-4 $39.95s cloth
Twelve
of the chapters individually examine the northern and eastern portions of the
Southwest and the groups who settled there during the protohistoric period.
The authors develop histories for settlement clusters that offer insights into
their unique development and the variety of ways that villages formed these
clusters. These analyses show the extent to which spatial clusters of large
settlements may have formed regionally organized alliances, and in some cases
they reveal a connection between protohistoric villages and indigenous or migratory
groups from the preceding period.
This volume is distinct from other recent syntheses of Pueblo IV research in
that it treats the settlement cluster as the analytic unit. By analyzing how
members of clusters of villages interacted with one another, it offers a clearer
understanding of the value of this level of analysis and suggests possibilities
for future research.
In addition to offering new insights on the Pueblo IV world, the volume serves
as a compendium of information on more than 400 known villages larger than 50
rooms. It will be of lasting interest not only to archaeologists but also to
geographers, land managers, and general readers interested in Pueblo culture.
E. Charles Adams is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and
Curator of Archaeology at the Arizona State Museum and is the author of Homol’ovi:
An Ancient Hopi Settlement Cluster. Andrew I. Duff is Assistant Professor of
Anthropology at Washington State University and the author of Western Pueblo
Identities: Regional Interaction, Migration, and Transformation.
July 260 pp., 66 illustrations 8 1/2 x 11
ISBN 0-8165-2343-6 $50.00s cloth
Edited by David R. Abbott
In the prehispanic Southwest, Pueblo Grande was the site of the largest platform mound in the Phoenix basin and the most politically prominent village in the region. It has long been held to represent the apex of Hohokam culture that designates the Classic period.
New data from
major excavations in Phoenix, however, suggest that little was “classic”
about the Classic period at Pueblo Grande. These findings challenge views of
Hohokam society that prevailed for most of the twentieth century, suggesting
that for Pueblo Grande it was a time of decline rather than prosperity, a time
marked by overpopulation, environmental degradation, resource shortage, poor
health, and social disintegration. During this period, the Hohokam in the lower
Salt River Valley began a precipitous slide toward the eventual abandonment
of a homeland that they had occupied for more than one thousand years.
This volume is a long-awaited summary of one of the most important data-recovery
projects in Southwest archaeology, synthesizing thousands of pages of data and
text published in seven volumes of contract reports. The authors—all leading
authorities in Hohokam archaeology who played primary roles in this revolution
of understanding—here craft a compelling argument for the eventual collapse
of Hohokam society in the late fourteenth century as seen from one of the largest
and seemingly most influential irrigation communities along the lower Salt River.
Drawing on extremely large and well-preserved collections, the book reveals startling evidence of a society in decline as reflected in catchment analysis, archaeofaunal assemblage composition, skeletal studies, burial assemblages, artifact exchange, and ceramic production. The volume also includes a valuable new summary of the archival reconstruction of the architectural sequence for the Pueblo Grande platform mound.
With its wealth of data, interpretation, and synthesis, Centuries of Decline represents a milestone in our understanding of Hohokam culture. It is a key reference for Southwest archaeologists who seek to understand the Hohokam collapse and a benchmark for anyone interested in the prehistory of Arizona.
David R. Abbott
is Research Associate at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson and author of Ceramics
and Community Organization among the Hohokam.
265 pp., 31 illus.
6 x 9
ISBN 0-8165-2231-6 $47.50s cloth
Patrick D. Lyons
Southwestern archaeologists have long speculated about the scale and impact of ancient population movements. In Ancestral Hopi Migrations, Patrick Lyons infers the movement of large numbers of people from the Kayenta and Tusayan regions of northern Arizona to every major river valley in Arizona, parts of New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Building upon earlier studies, Lyons uses chemical sourcing of ceramics and analyses of painted pottery designs to distinguish among traces of exchange, emulation, and migration. He demonstrates strong similarities among the pottery traditions of the Kayenta region, the Hopi Mesas, and the Homol’ovi villages, near Winslow, Arizona. Architectural evidence marshaled by Lyons corroborates his conclusion that the inhabitants of Homol’ovi were immigrants from the north.
Placing the Homol’ovi case study in a larger context, Lyons synthesizes evidence of northern immigrants recovered from sites dating between A.D. 1250 and 1450. His data support Patricia Crown’s contention that the movement of these groups is linked to the origin of the Salado polychromes and further indicate that these immigrants and their descendants were responsible for the production of Roosevelt Red Ware throughout much of the Greater Southwest. Offering an innovative juxtaposition of anthropological data bearing on Hopi migrations and oral accounts of the tribe’s origin and history, Lyons highlights the many points of agreement between these two bodies of knowledge. Lyons argues that appreciating the scale of population movement that characterized the late prehistoric period is prerequisite to understanding regional phenomena such as Salado and to illuminating the connections between tribal peoples of the Southwest and their ancestors.
Patrick D. Lyons
is a preservation archaeologist at the Center for Desert Archaeology in Tucson
and former Emil W. Haury Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University
of Arizona.
Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona, No. 68
130 pp., 25 line
illus.
81?2 x 11
ISBN 0-8165-2280-4 $16.95s paper