This ethnohistory explores population decline, military conquest, cultural succession, and ethnic persistence in the upper Pecos River valley of what is now New Mexico from 1450 to 1850. Pecos Pueblo stood at the eastern frontier of the Pueblo world and was the trade window between the Southwest and the Southern Plains. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish conquest forced a new cultural order on the Pueblo Indians, including the Pecos. In the course of two and a half centuries, periodic epidemics, drought, ...
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This ethnohistory explores population decline, military conquest, cultural succession, and ethnic persistence in the upper Pecos River valley of what is now New Mexico from 1450 to 1850. Pecos Pueblo stood at the eastern frontier of the Pueblo world and was the trade window between the Southwest and the Southern Plains. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish conquest forced a new cultural order on the Pueblo Indians, including the Pecos. In the course of two and a half centuries, periodic epidemics, drought, famine, and warfare steadily eroded the Pecos population. The few remaining Pecos finally abandoned their pueblo and took up residence at Jemez Pueblo in the 1830s. Erroneously declared extinct in the 1850s, the Pecos became the subject of historical and anthropological speculations for a century and a half. Using data from Spanish mission records, the author explores the complex processes of social and cultural change and the negotiation of identity during Spanish and Anglo-American conquest. She also examines the historical context of hypothesizing Pecos' so-called extinction. Compiled from Spanish mission records, Levine's tables, lists, and appendices will be of great interest to genealogists, ethnographers, and historians.
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