Bibliography Records

The ruins of seventeenth-century Franciscan missions are among the most imposing structural relics of New Mexico’s colonial past. Missions like the ones at Pecos, Guisewa, Quarai, Abó, and Las Humanas (Gran Quivira)figure prominently in the opening stages of organized archaeological research in New Mexico (Ivey 1988; Ivey and Thomas 2005; Kessell 1997). Together with surviving mission churches (at Acoma, Isleta, and several other pueblos), these ruins, stabilized and partly reconstructed, impress on modern visitors something of the tortuous encounter between Pueblos and Spaniards during the early colonial period between 1598 and 1680. Visibility can be misleading, however. Th e historical narrative of missionization efforts in New Mexico and elsewhere in Spain’s overseas colonies reveals a rather more complex picture than one conveyed merely by the largest physical remains stemming from those efforts (e.g., Christlieb and Urquijo Torres 2006; Gerhard 1977; Quezada 1995). In New Mexico, the focus on late-stage mission structures combined with a general paucity of spatially representative structural and stratigraphic data from both missions and their respective host pueblos means that the initial encounter between natives and missionaries in New Mexico is still underrepresented in the colonial narrative. And aside from the question of how missions were established, administered, and received during their founding phases, the development and role of smaller missions (visitas) that were not permanently staff ed and only sporadically “visited” by friars based at a neighboring cabecera or “head mission” also remains largely unknown (Bletzer 2011).