FIFTEEN

Introduction

While preparing these comments, editors John G. Douglass and William M. Graves shared with me Kent Lightfoot’s (chapter 14) enlightened comparison of the Southwestern papers in this volume with the Alta California experience. These fortunate circumstances afforded me the chance to tailor-make my own contribution in complimentary directions.

I was assigned to draw some parallels and contrasts between the chapters in this book addressing the colonial Southwest and comparable histories now emerging from the Mississippian Southeast. It is my pleasure to do this and because Lightfoot has already commented in detail on the individual chapters, I will frame my own discussion as a more generalized theoretical conversation—drawing upon the themes and specifics of the southwestern chapters, to be sure, but also developing related themes about the importance of materiality and agency as it played out in the “practical politics” of both colonial encounters (after Silliman 2001).

This discussion is informed by Igor Kopytoff’s (1986:66–67) advocacy for constructing the cultural biography of things, interrogating objects in ways akin to asking questions of people—inquiring about the relevant possibilities for understanding status, temporality, and cultural context. Where did something come from and who made it? How far did its use life go? What are its expectations for the future? What are the ideal expectations for this thing? Are there various life stages of this object, and what are the cultural identifiers associated with these? Does a thing’s usage change with age? Is there an expected time when the thing is no longer useful? What is its afterlife? William Walker and Lisa Lucero (Walker and Lucero 2000:12) expand these concepts by distinguishing between a biographical approach to artifact genealogies from the more inclusive concept of genealogies of practice (see also Joyce and Lopiparo 2005). Viewing “things as historicized traces of practices” (Joyce 2012a), objects can be animated from static to active through “object itineraries” that emphasize motion and interaction, fragmentation and accumulation—tracking objects moving through time and space, as they entwined with people and places (see also Joyce and Gillespie 2015). Object agency can indeed be archaeologically accessible, and Walker and Lucero (2000) have incorporated agency theory to examine how artifact life histories, ritual, and politics intersect. With this in mind, I will present a comparative inquiry into the biographies of public architecture and singularized objects from the Southwest and Southeast.

Pueblo Colonial Worlds

Neither the Spanish colony in New Mexico nor that in La Florida was self-sustaining, because both outposts were significantly underwritten by the Spanish Crown, at least partly for strategic purposes. Following standard sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial practice, missionaries were stationed near the principal indigenous settlements closely associated with a frontier garrison; inevitably, the proximity of soldiers to the native populations created problems with political meddling, distribution of supplies, and harassment of local women. But Franciscans from both corners of the Spanish Borderlands articulated the critical importance of saving Indian souls if the colonies were to remain in business (see Liebmann 2012:34–35; Riley 1999:86–87; Thomas 2014, 2015).

Franciscan Missions in the American Southwest

Initial prospects for missionization in the Southwest must have seemed bright. “For Franciscans, who insisted that Indians live like Spaniards and tried to congregate them into towns if they did not, the apartment-dwelling Pueblos seemed a godsend” (Weber 1999:4). The Spanish called these apparently permanent towns—and the people who lived there—los pueblos, to distinguish them from the more mobile Apache and Navajos (Thomas 2013a, 2013b; see also Phillip O. Leckman, chapter 3 in this volume).

Hispanic optimism was quickly shattered by the realities of fluid Pueblo settlement strategies, often involving annual cycles of seasonal dispersal and aggregation, with households frequently relocating among villages. This was a problem for Franciscans seeking full-time sedentary populations, preferably under the control of a single political leader. Juan de Oñate complained about the lack of solid decision making and governance within Pueblo society: “In government they are free, for although they have petty captains, they obey them badly and in very few things” (quoted in Bolton 1908).

Oñate had put his finger squarely on a dilemma that would bedevil top-down Hispanic colonial thinking for centuries: Who, exactly, are the Pueblo leaders? Who, exactly, makes the decisions? Who, exactly, has the power to negotiate commitments? Where, exactly, does the leadership hierarchy reside? Answering these questions is critical for understanding how and why Spanish and Pueblo trajectories intertwined.

Decision-Making, Factionalism, and Social Agency

Pueblos lived as autonomous villagers, with their decision-making process ramified through differential access to esoteric knowledge and ceremonial objects, social duties, and family/lineage alignments, and inequities in wealth and power (Brandt 1994; McGuire and Saitta 1996). “To the extent that the Pueblos are govern at all,” cautions John Ware (2002:94), “they are governed by hierarchies of priests—members of secret sodalities who exercise authority over the ritual, and in many communities, the mundane aspects of everyday life.” At least among the Hopi, society (sodality) chiefs had a considerably more important role in political life than conventional ethnographies allow—they were not subservient assistants to village chiefs, but instead independent participants with the groups of decision makers, with village chiefs being merely “first among equals” (Whiteley 1988).

Lee Panich, arguing for “archaeologies of persistence,” emphasizes the variability in how native communities negotiated their colonial world (Panich 2013:17). Matthew Liebmann, Robert Preucel, and Joseph Aguilar (chapter 5 in this volume) highlight the pervasive factionalism in Pueblo societies. Citing Edward Dozier (1966), they stress an “endemic … inherent opposition” to the compulsory dictates of Pueblo authorities leading to the extraordinary level of intracommunity friction before, during, and after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

At the core of the Pueblo Revolt were the northern Tiwa, Tewa, and Towa and the eastern Keresan Pueblos. Acoma, Hopi, and Zuni also joined in, though at least one Hopi town (Awat’ovi) had a strong Christian faction (Brooks 2013; Thomas 2014). The southern Tiwa were divided. The southernmost Pueblos, the Piros and Tompiros, refused to follow along. And even in the heartland of the rebellion, pro-Franciscan factions persisted, leading Po’pay and his colleagues to take sometimes savage actions against those perceived to be wavering or disloyal to the cause (Riley 1999:222–24). As Liebmann, Preucel, and Aguilar (chapter 5 in this volume) argue, the pan-Pueblo alliance “didn’t so much break down after 1680 as it was continually renegotiated by Pueblo leaders in response to changing needs within the postrevolt community.”

Thomas E. Sheridan and Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa (chapter 9 in this volume) likewise underscore the importance of social agency, local histories, and Pueblo factionalism in their assessment of long-term oral accounts of Franciscan “abusive guests.” Emphasizing the constellation of factors that triggered the anti-Spanish rebellion at Hopi, these authors craft narratives from both indigenous and Hispanic sources, stressing that each perspective has “strengths and limitations that need to be understood.” Whereas conventional accounts have long privileged the friction caused when the pro-Catholic faction invited Franciscans to return to Hopi after the Pueblo Revolt, Sheridan and Koyiyumptewa argue that Hopi accounts paint a much more complex picture (see also Whiteley 2002). Regardless, the end result was Pueblo factionalism at its worst—“destruction of one of their own communities and the killing of their own people still sear Hopi memories today.”

Pro- and anti-Franciscan factions arose in most Pueblo communities, though the precise histories of each are difficult to discern. William Merrill (2009:130) emphasizes that some indigenous Pueblo practices have similarities and parallels to the Catholic rites introduced by Franciscans during colonial times. There is also considerable evidence that power imbalance and gender inequality helped spawn the resulting factions in colonial Pueblo societies. James Brooks (2013:754) argues that Franciscan Catholicism provided a counterbalance to the Katsina religion. Young single males—accorded lower rank and status than the headmen of the medicine societies, sodalities, and Katsina societies—formed the core of neophyte Franciscan enlistees throughout several Pueblo communities.

Katsina ritualism predominantly enhanced masculine ritual power, and in most manifestations, provisions were made to include young males in the ritual organization, to be formalized at puberty. Women were prohibited from acquiring Katsina knowledge among the eastern Pueblos, at Zuni and to some degree at Hopi. The Pueblo Revolt further reflected the chasms separating traditionalists from those drawn to Catholicism, pulling not only on religious sympathies but also “the inequities in power that had crosscut Pueblo society for generations” (Brooks 2013:756). Women likewise did not rank high among Po’pay’s priorities for the new Pueblo world. It is small wonder that women in particular were attracted to a Franciscan catechism that honored the lives and suffering of female saints. As Liebmann (2002, 2012:136–42) notes, during the post-Revolt era in the Rio Grande area there are repeated representations of the Virgin Mary in rock art associated with refugee pueblos.

The Pueblo world was structured in ways fostering factionalism and resistance to top-down changes ordered by Spanish colonial authorities (including members of the Franciscan order). The resulting conflicts reflect a pervasive social agency that privileged decisions by factions of actors who were simultaneously operating within contemporary colonial contexts, yet making critical decisions for the future. While such social agency can indeed involve innovation and change, there are also options to reiterate (in whole or in part) what was done in the past (Joyce and Lopiparo 2005:368–70).

Mississippian Colonial Worlds

Comparing the Pueblo and Mississippian worlds, it is difficult to overemphasize the deep-reaching contrasts in decision making and social agency. Hernando de Soto’s expedition was structured along medieval lines of Hispanic honor and hierarchy, with social status determined by a complex system of racial gradients and classifications (Hudson 1997:10; Thomas 2013a, 2014). These sixteenth-century Spaniards noticed immediately how closely Southeastern Indian societies were “structurally similar to their own society . . . some Indians possessed more social honor than others” (Hudson 1997:17, 23). The Spanish newcomers knew intrinsically how such hierarchies operated and they insisted that negotiations proceed strictly between paramounts, with everyone else expected to fall in line.

“Inequality was institutionalized in the Southeast” (Hudson 1997:17). The Muskogean-speaking descendants of pre-Columbian powerhouses at Etowah, Moundville, and Ocmulgee lived in what John Swanton (1922:84) termed “a kind of confederacy” built upon relatively short-term and brittle federations of chiefdoms characterized by long-distance trade networks and centralized leadership (G. Jones 1978:179; Worth 2002, 2013a, 2013b). These contact-period Mississippian polities were long committed to maintaining hereditary birthright based on genealogical distance from a single noble ancestor. Dominants belonged to a privileged chiefly class, enjoying great status and wealth. Mississippian subordinates supplied the labor and material resources to underwrite this hereditary inequality (and in the case of the conscripted draft risked their lives in chiefly warfare).

As a result, Pueblo-style factionalism was not manifest in La Florida, and there was no Mississippian equivalent to the “endemic” and “inherent opposition” to Pueblo authorities (Dozier 1966). In the Southeast, disputes within individual lineages were handled internally, and between-lineage misunderstandings were handled by the caciques (locally termed micos) and other mechanisms of chiefly governance (which varied considerably in terms of centrality and power). Individual chiefdoms identified closely with their micos and were protective of chiefly authority. At least one of de Soto’s prisoners committed suicide rather than betray his mico (Hudson 1976:223, 233). When irreparable disputes arose between towns and lineages, they sometimes split to acquire distinctive social identities, each with its own ceremonial center and ritual practices. Sometimes chiefdoms fused, but in other cases they maintained separate council houses (Blair and Thomas 2014).

In short, the inherently segmented sociopolitical structure of southwestern Pueblos often resisted the sweeping changes brought about by colonial authority. In contrast, Mississippian long-term hierarchical and authoritarian structure was vastly more compatible with the sixteenth-century Spanish colonial system imported to the deep American South.

Franciscan Missions in Spanish Florida

In the wake of the Hernando de Soto, Tristán de Luna, and Juan Pardo entradas, the major chiefdoms of the deep interior collapsed into the “Mississippian shatter zone,” where the remnants would be spared direct or sustained contact with Europeans for more than 130 years (Ethridge and Shuck-Hall 2009). A wholly different scenario played out in La Florida, where (with rare exceptions) the soldiers and friars stuck close to the Atlantic coastline and Apalachee Province to the southwest. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established La Florida in 1565 as a strategic Spanish foothold to stave off further French settlements and to safeguard the fleet of the Indies through the Bahama Channel as the treasure-laden ships sailed back to Spain. This strategic significance ultimately ensured a relatively stable source of royal funding, but it also required that Spanish colonists in St. Augustine rely heavily on local Native American populations to buffer against interruptions in external supply lines.

From the outset, Spanish colonists were dependent on the human and natural riches of La Florida. With both slavery and abusive treatment of indigenous people explicitly banned, Menéndez de Avilés and his successors were constrained to ensuring good treatment for indigenous peoples, acting with explicit permission from all Native leaders. This is why the Europeans colonizing Spanish Florida elected to become active participants in indigenous political dynamics, bolstering and reinforcing the political power of traditional Indian leaders. Hereditary chiefs retained considerable internal autonomy over secular matters and ruled using traditional lines of authority.

The seventeenth-century economy of Spanish Florida evolved into an exchange network through which Native populations channeled their surplus food (primarily maize) and labor into colonial St. Augustine. Several indigenous Timucua, Mocamo, and Guale caciques elected to pledge allegiance and obedience to Spanish officials; others did not. Those siding with the newcomers annexed a powerful military ally in the Spanish garrison at St. Augustine. These Native paramounts not only generated new markets for their agricultural surplus, but they also gained access to new tools and technologies to improve their yield.

Clearly, Franciscan friars in both Spanish Florida and the American Southwest served as face-to-face primary agents of directed social change, but the two mission systems were vastly different. Amy Turner Bushnell has long argued that the mission in Spanish Florida “was no theocracy. It was a fully functioning Native town governed by an interlocking set of hereditary and elected native leaders” (Bushnell 1994:28; see also Bushnell 2014). John Worth (2013a) takes things a step further, arguing that Franciscan friars stationed in La Florida functioned in a manner analogous to the modern Peace Corps, granted voluntary admittance into Native American communities to assist in the transition to a new order. While Franciscan missionaries remained at the head of the new church, they did so only within the context of chiefly authority, accepting the continued practice of ancient indigenous Mississippian religion alongside new Christian rites.

The friars occupied unique new roles in the hybrid colonial context of La Florida, operating as cultural facilitators to help bridge the realities of pre-Columbian and colonial Spanish practice. Franciscans assumed economic responsibilities (especially involving intensified agricultural production), negotiated new roles for the military, and interceded at times on behalf of the mission Indians (often shoring up traditional Mississippian hierarchies). By accepting conversion to Christianity and accepting resident Franciscan friars within the local community’s jurisdiction, native chiefs could retain authority reckoned through ancient Mississippian hereditary bloodlines, while still drawing on the largesse of the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown.

Social agency is evident in all quarters. Franciscans assigned to La Florida had to accommodate religious practices other than those they knew previously or necessarily condoned. At times, they objected and resisted. The Mississippian micos and populace tolerated living conditions that differed from their long-term community practices from before. At times, they also objected and resisted as well. But it is clear that Spanish colonial functionaries and hereditary Mississippian nobility alike enjoyed “considerable room for individual interpretation” (Worth 1998:124)—practical politics and social agency in action (see also Blair 2015a, 2015b; Blair and Thomas 2014; Bushnell 2014; Thomas 2014, 2015).

Tribute, Materiality, and the Trappings of Chiefly Power

In the transition from entrada to permanent colonization, as elsewhere in the New World, the Spanish crafted ways (some legal, some not) to extract tribute and exploit the indigenous populations. The encomienda (in which trustees held a specific number of Natives in trust) and the repartimiento de indios (which distributed Native men to work on a rotating basis for the public good) were the favored “legal” institutions. Some Spaniards also turned to the patently illegal practice of taking Indian slaves—rarely among mission Indians (their labor was exploited in other ways), that is to say, seizing “pagans” beyond the expanding rim of Christendom (Weber 1994:124–29; see also Brooks 2002).

Tribute in the American Southwest was basically a one-way street, with Pueblo households assigned the burden of producing foodstuffs and textiles for the newcomers (see Laurie D. Webster [chapter 4], this volume). By contrast, Atlantic coastal Mississippians had paid and received tribute for centuries, and Guale households knew no other way. Mississippian micos held important offices in local political and religious hierarchies, with tangible social, political, and economic advantages. While inherited status was a necessary condition for leadership, micos found themselves constantly required to shore up their power base through effective manipulation of ritual, access to scarce trade items, and hospitality.

These paramounts had long maintained large-scale, regional systems of tribute, traveling extensively to conduct war, diplomacy, ritual, and participate in complex, rank-enhancing marriage alliances. The trappings of chiefly office included clothing, adornment, and regalia—long staples in the Mississippian world well before European contact (Worth 1998:12–13). The preexisting emphasis on appropriate chiefly attire and the exchange of exotic luxury items such as conch shell, polished greenstone, high-quality chert, and native copper were particularly important between neighboring chiefdoms in transactions that were more symbolic than economic.

The colonial system in Spanish Florida reinforced such long-standing Mississippian power structures by channeling access to indigenous land and labor through hereditary chiefs. By participating in the external colonial Spanish markets, traditional Guale leaders transformed agricultural surpluses, land, and labor—all commodities under their control—into military backing and, perhaps more important, the symbolically charged Spanish goods, including cloth, tools, and beads. In this way, the caciques positioned themselves to receive tribute from both the Spaniards and their own people. “In effect, Spanish Florida became a sort of modified paramount chiefdom through which the chiefly matrilineages of destabilized chiefdoms bolstered their own internal power by subordinating themselves to the Spanish crown” (Worth 2002:46; see also Pearsall 2013).

The pivotal importance of material goods and native labor thus carried over from precontact to colonial times, with selected micos now enjoying exclusive access to new tribute items and prestige items to enhance their chiefly authority (Hall 2009; Francis and Kole 2011:91). To illustrate:

The Spanish often scoffed at these tribute items as simply trifles and trinkets being circulated among naive indigenous leaders. But to the Mississippian micos and those they ruled, these “trinkets” were not merely tokens of Spanish largess. In many ways, such gifts “represented the ‘cement’ for the colonial system, providing local and regional caciques with visible symbols of chiefly rank and status by way of access to exotic Spanish clothing, food and other items. Chiefs who failed to return from St. Augustine with such gifts might have been far less likely to overlook the more insidious consequences of missionization” (Worth 1998:137).

In effect, these knives with special handles, the lengths of blue and red cloth, and multicolored beads had become sanctified and ritualized out of the Spanish world of commodities and into the Mississippian realm of priceless non-commodities. Kopytoff (1986:64–68) terms this process “singularization,” reflecting the need for societies “to set apart a certain portion of their environment, marking it as ‘sacred.’” Through ritual practice, such commodities became “singularized” because they no longer belonged to the usual economic sphere. Such symbolically sacred things include public lands, monuments, state art collections, paraphernalia of political power, royal residences, chiefly insignia, and ritual objects. As noncommodities, they are “priceless” “in the full possible sense of the term, ranging from the uniquely valuable to the uniquely worthless.” Symbolic authority typically asserts itself by reserving and exercising the right to “singularize” objects through an extension of sacred power as projected onto “sacralized objects . . . [and] biographies of things can make salient what might otherwise remain obscure” (Kopytoff 1986:67, 73–75).

The centrality of tribute items and their role in maintaining the Mississippian chiefly order contrasts vividly with the intra-Puebloan factional egalitarianism that characterized the American Southwest. Paramount chiefs of La Florida competed with one another—sometimes violently—to enter into the Franciscan mission system; by courting the Hispanic newcomers, they defined novel ways to maintain and continue their Mississippian practices—employing ostentatious displays of wealth and status items to reinforce their hereditary status. Oddly enough, the Franciscan mission system provided Mississippian polities a way of projecting past practices into an uncertain future.

The Guale Revolt of 1597

Fray Gerónimo de Oré was not in La Florida in late fall 1597, when Guale Indians burned the churches of coastal Georgia and murdered five Franciscan friars stationed along the coast. But Oré’s (1619) remarkable Martyrs of Georgia chronicled the details of this bloody indigenous revolt against the Spanish and long remained the authoritative voice of the 1597 unrest.

Until very recently, Borderlands historiographers have been unanimous in accepting Oré’s reading of this event as a violent indigenous revolt against Spanish rule—basically an unsuccessful southeastern rehearsal of the Pueblo Revolt that would play out eight decades later. Virtually all modern treatments of the 1597 unpleasantness emphasize Franciscan interference in Guale affairs and missionary opposition to the practice of polygamy (Pearsall 2013). This historiography singles out a Guale Indian named Don Juan as the principal leader against the Spanish, and in most recent accounts of the episode, it is simply referred to as “Juanillo’s revolt” (e.g., Gannon 1965; Hoffman 2002; Lanning 1935).

Extensive new documentary and archaeological research has demonstrated that the Guale uprising of 1597 was not an indigenous rebellion against Spanish authority at all (Blair and Thomas 2014; Francis and Kole 2011; Thomas 2013a, 2013b; see also Pearsall 2013; Worth 2002, 2013a, 2013b). Instead, the root cause of unrest actually reflects the underlying tensions and conflicts between indigenous chiefdoms competing for favored status within La Florida. The Spanish colony at St. Augustine had morphed into another powerful Mississippian chiefdom, simultaneously allying with, and competing against, existing Guale, Mocamo, and Timucua chiefdoms. To maintain hegemony during the late sixteenth century, paramount Guale chiefs had become dependent not only on alliances and tribute relationships from lesser Guale polities, but also support from the Spanish government.¹

Comparing the Guale and Pueblo Revolts

Dozens of Franciscans were martyred in the Pueblo and Guale uprisings, but they perished for very different reasons. The Pueblo Revolt was about overt rejection of forced conversions and tribute demands, crosscutting existing communities of practice and involving many different kinds of people. The friars became the focus of the violence because the conflict was aimed at driving the Spanish away forever. These events “ultimately created a Pueblo people, who had not existed as such prior to the revolt . . . both women and men helped to create this new world out of old forms” (Pearsall 2013:1026).

By contrast, the social agency and materiality that powered the Guale Rebellion of 1597 reflect an internecine struggle about chiefly power (whether mico or Franciscan), a conflict between embattled paramounts locked in bloody traditional warfare. The friars were caught in the middle because the conflict centered on retaining and enhancing favored-nation status within the Franciscan mission system. Coercion and involuntary constraints certainly existed within the missions of Spanish Florida, but such had been the reality for subordinates living in the Mississippian world centuries before the Spanish entradas. In La Florida, both colonists and indigenous people had joined into a social, economic, and political hierarchy that bore considerably more similarity to Mississippian-style chiefdoms than Spanish settlements in the rest of the New World.

Social rank and status remained primary among the Guale people, including those neophytes living in the Franciscan missions of La Florida. The specific conditions that ignited the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 did not exist in Spanish Florida, because of the direct and highly public continuities of precolonial practices. This Spanish colonial–Mississippian hybrid continued to provide the external support necessary to maintain the authority of hereditary chiefs, who kept clinging to time-worn vestiges of traditional rank and privilege “even in the face of near total demographic collapse—along with English-sponsored raids—surviving missions retreated into the shadow of St. Augustine . . . [and] chiefly lineages still survived. Ultimately, the Spanish colonial strategy served to preserve these ancient social systems in a way unparalleled by other forms of European interaction” (Worth 2002:59).

Architecture as Social Agency

The colonial period of New Mexico has long been approached from perspective of informed (if occasionally heavy-handed) readings of textual evidence from the colonial era. So viewed, the Spanish colonial period witnessed a nearly complete disruption of Puebloan society—a landscape in which virtually all Pueblo Indians became Christians, fully subjugated by Franciscans until a handful of rebels and troublemakers touched off the unpleasantness of 1680. This view was fostered by France Scholes (1937, 1942), among many others, and continues to be articulated by those who tended to accept the documentary evidence at face value (Ivey and Thomas 2005). As Sheridan and Koyiyumptewa (chapter 9 in this volume) emphasize, sometimes these documents can be accurate and sometimes they are not.

In fact, several contributors to this volume argued that simple European domination/indigenous resistance models of colonialism must be replaced by agent-centered and practice-based approaches (see also Blair 2015b; Blair and Thomas 2014; Panich 2013:108–9). Matthew Liebmann and Melissa Murphy (Liebmann and Murphy 2010:7, 17–18) highlight problems with the previous “Grand Narratives” constructed centuries after the fact and viewing Spanish colonialism in the Americas as a “clash of cultures.” They persuasively argue that modern discourse must transcend these “oversimplified notions of domination and resistance [implying] seemingly self-evident notions of (dominant) cores and (dominated) peripheries, active colonizers and passive colonized and the false dichotomy of indigenous survival versus extinction.” These authors likewise criticize the recent generation of so-called resistance studies as flattening out the past, granting social agency to indigenous resistors, but denying equivalent agency to the colonizers. Liebmann and Murphy (2010) call for “bottom up” considerations of colonization, with an explicit recognition of individual and/or collective actions for all players in the colonial communities of practice.

To bring this conversation back to materiality, it is useful to examine object agency as expressed in the architecture of ritual. Although ritual behavior can be everywhere, some ritual practices operate at scales more archaeologically visible than others (Mills and Walker 2008:22). Here, I will isolate several such “ritually charged” spaces in the colonial Southwest and Southeast, paying particular attention to the choices being made about reiterating the past or choosing not to do so (Joyce and Lopiparo 2005:368).

Colonial architecture juxtaposes ritually charged spaces in new contexts. The Spanish colonial use of space was constrained by the utopian Ordinances of the Indies, guidelines for town planning in the New World (though rarely practiced on the Iberian Peninsula). Leckman (chapter 3 in this volume) explores how Spanish colonial spatial perceptions played out at the archaeological site of Paako, where the Ordinances provided a bridge for incorporating the basics of Iberian town planning with long-term indigenous secular (and sometimes ritual) architectures.

Situated within this larger framework, Franciscan custom involved long-established architectural conventions that generally played out, in one form or another, in the missions of the Spanish Borderlands, with the entire mission complex—not just the church and friary, but also the offices, storerooms, workshops, sheds, barns, pens, herds, and fields—becoming virtually a self-contained community. This was certainly the intent of the design, derived from over 800 years of monastic tradition and four centuries of Franciscan development. The Franciscan plan varied considerably in medieval Europe and in renaissance Mexico. Individual friars traveling into the Spanish Borderlands carried with them accumulated monastic experiences. Franciscan friar’s practice, then, reflected a degree of social agency in constructing their generation of mission architecture and in the way in which the Catholic rituals would be conducted—based on personal experience in the churches attended as a child, the mission colleges, and the other missions visited, all of which molded idealized plans in the minds of a friars, influencing what was built at the new missions.

The missions of La Florida reflect a hybrid blend of Franciscan and Mississippian spaces. At Mission San Luis de Talimali archaeologists discovered a huge council house (buhio) capable of seating 2,000–3,000 people inside (McEwan 2014a, 2014b; Shapiro and Hann 1990). Long the most important feature of Mississippian settlements, the council house functioned variously as the seat of chiefly government, a community meeting place, a place for Black Drink ceremonialism, a locus for interacting with Spanish authorities, and a place to house enemy scalps. The buhio at San Luis fronted the main mission plaza (directly across from the mission church)—the material consequence of a unique blending of indigenous and Franciscan place logic.

Franciscans in Spanish Florida were also confronted by the ball game, a centuries-old custom commonly played between competing villages (with 50 to 100 participants to a side). Pelota games typically lasted a half day with omens and rituals attending every aspect of the game; serious injuries were not uncommon (Bushnell 1978). A debate raged within the Franciscan community about whether the ball game was compatible with Christianity—was the ball game a simple athletic contest or a survival of pagan demonic beliefs? The Franciscans initially supported the ball-game complex, arguing that attending the ball games encouraged sedentism among neophytes and increased attendance at mass. The Governor of St. Augustine also reluctantly supported the practice under pressure from caciques anxious to keep tribute relationships and responsibilities intact. But Apalachee paramounts eventually prevailed with arguments claiming that these ancient Mississippian did indeed reflect “pagan” beliefs, especially the symbolism of sun, thunder, and rain deities. When the Apalachee caciques insisted that such non-Christian practices could not be permitted in their mission communities, the Franciscans eventually complied.

The ritualized architecture of La Florida thus reflected a tightly negotiated and sometimes fluid hybrid of Franciscan ideals played out in the context of continuing Mississippian beliefs and materials.

The Kiva as an Object Lesson in Social Agency

Coronado’s entrada encountered a ritually charged space they called estufas, which today is better known as the kiva. These underground chambers served multiple functions in the Pueblo world, including Katsina dances and rituals and clan or social group meeting rooms. In her dynamite study of colonial materiality, Webster (chapter 4 in this volume) addresses the Southwestern kiva as locus of textile making. The shifting tribute demands imposed by the encomienda required that Pueblo households make twice-yearly payments of cotton blankets, hides, or corn to encomenderos, including Franciscans, who sometimes exchanged Pueblo-made textiles southward to Mexico for church furnishings. Among the Rio Grande Pueblos, these tribute requirements ultimately caused significant shifts in the sexual division of labor, and the timing and contexts of textile production, to say nothing of the long-distance patterns of textile exchange. But more isolated Hopi communities, while still impacted by colonial demands, maintained long-term practices of textile production into modern times.

Webster’s impressive chapter (4) examines the materiality of textile production by focusing on the nature of kiva practice and architecture at Hopi. Watson Smith (1972:76, 75) argued that kivas were abandoned 1630–80 due to missionary pressure, but Hopi oral tradition suggests that kivas were still used throughout this period (Courlander 1971:160). By tracking diagnostic loom holes in the Pueblo V kiva and nonkiva spaces at Awat’ovi (Smith 1972), Webster concludes that men did indeed manufacture of textiles for tribute on upright looms inside kivas throughout the Franciscan interval, with at least tacit approval by friars. But encomienda pressures likewise appear to have fostered weaving in outdoor, nontraditional settings including public plazas (perhaps reflecting manufacture by women as well). If so, then it would seem the cultural biographies of Hopi textiles maybe have temporarily shifted from their ritualized, noncommodity (“priceless”) function to a temporary “commodified” status appropriate for economic tribute (Kopytoff 1986). After the expulsion of the Spanish, the highly gendered system of textile production was “re-sacralized” to long-term Hopi practices (if it ever really changed at all).

Webster (chapter 4) concludes that the geographical remoteness and marginal environment of the Hopi mesas shielded these communities from many of the Spanish labor demands experienced by Rio Grande pueblos, thereby affording them more freedom to maintain precontact ritualized practices. Among the Rio Grande pueblos and elsewhere, more intensive day-to-day interaction with Spanish authorities and the resulting material consequences reflect multiple responses within the ritually charged sacred spaces of the kiva.

The Theory of Superposition

The Southwestern Grand Narrative was most eloquently developed by Ross Montgomery, in an evolved theological metaphor he termed the “theory of superposition” and applied without reservation to Franciscan and indigenous architectural practice throughout colonial New Mexico (Montgomery 1949:143–37; see also Brew 1949:65–67; Ivey 1998:126). The “superposition” argument holds that whenever a prerevolt kiva is associated with a church and convento in colonial New Mexico, the Franciscans must have deliberately built their church over that earlier sacred space to obliterate the pagan past.

Harvard University excavations at Awat’ovi exposed portions of the sacristy and sanctuary of the church at San Bernardo de Aguatubi in Room 788. Montgomery predicted at the time that a desanctified kiva should lie buried immediately below (Smith 1972:59–66). To test this hypothesis, a small pit was dug through the sanctuary near the steps leading up to the predella (the altar platform), revealing the top of a masonry wall with a wooden beam emplaced in a socket, buried 1.25 meters below—clearly evidence of the kiva predicted by Montgomery. This was pretty good science as practiced in late 1930s, with an a priori hypothesis expressed and tested on independent data.

Reflecting the Grand Narrative, archaeologists working at Awat’ovi concluded that Franciscans had deliberately and symbolically subjugated Hopi religion by erecting a Christian altar over the sacred ground of the past. Sheridan and Koyiyumptewa (chapter 9 in this volume) agree that by building the church at Awat’ovi directly over a “perfectly preserved kiva,” these “abusive guests” were proclaiming that “the Christian God was superior to Hopi gods, that Christian sacred spaces were submerging Hopi sacred spaces.” Hopi traditional history and Harvard archaeology thus concur. This specific interpretation—and the larger issue of ritual superposition across colonial New Mexico—has generally been accepted and has not been criticized in print until James Ivey specifically questioned the hypothesis of deliberate superposition at Awat’ovi (1998; see also Ivey and Thomas 2005:211; Thomas 2014).

There is no question that Church 2 at Awat’ovi was built over two intentionally backfilled kivas, one with ceiling beams intact. But does this archaeological fact reflect deliberate superposition? Relative to Church 2 architecture, both buried kivas were offset in an “untidy location,” which Ivey attributes entirely to chance alone—suggesting that other similar kivas are probably buried nearby, but the excavators did not look for them. He points out that Church 2 was only a temporary structure, soon to be replaced by a more impressive church building. Did the friars at Awat’ovi had sufficient power and agency to destroy publically one or more kivas then insultingly erect a new temporary Christian church over the top? Ivey argues that the emplacement of Church 2 was the outcome of seventeenth-century Franciscan negotiations with both pro- and anti-Catholic factions at Hopi. Together, they must have agreed to decommission the kiva spaces followed by a careful, orderly, and respectful backfilling process.²

Aside from the contested kivas at Awat’ovi, there are no other examples of kivas being deliberately buried beneath Catholic churches in New Mexico, and there is every reason to question the Theory of Superposition as applied to the colonial Southwest (Ivey 1998:132; Ivey and Thomas 2005).

Reverse Superposition

The archaeology of Pecos Pueblo provides another telling example of how the Grand Narrative has continued to color interpretation of Spanish colonial archaeology in the American Southwest.

Shortly after the ruins at Pecos were gifted to the National Park Service in 1965, Jean Pinkley and Alden Hayes excavated (or reexcavated) almost the entire Franciscan convent, finding a well-preserved kiva buried inside one of the rooms. The associated artifact inventory suggested a century-long window for the construction date of the kiva (roughly 1620 through 1720). Rather than address the ambiguity, Hayes instead enlisted the concept of superposition (in reverse). He argued that after demolishing the church and convent in 1680, rebellious Pueblos symbolically reclaimed their land by deliberately emplacing one or more kivas in formerly sacred Franciscan space (Hayes 1974:23–35; see also Ivey and Thomas 2005:211). John Kessell (1979:239) accepted this interpretation of the archaeological evidence, likewise attributing the Pecos convento kiva to postrevolt fervor, when victorious rebels took over the church space and dug a new kiva inside the convento: “The symbolism was clear. The ancient ones had overcome. The saints, mere pieces of rotted wood, were dead.”

More recent archaeological evidence suggests a more plausible alternative. Courtney White’s (1996) reanalaysis of the bricks and adobe mortar sequence at Pecos makes it clear that the “convento kiva” was constructed during the interval 1630–40—squarely during the height of the Franciscan involvement at Pecos. As at Awat’ovi, it seems highly unlikely that anti-Catholic factions could have built such an outlaw convento kiva with the pro-Franciscan factions still in place (Ivey 1998:125–26, 133). It seems more likely that the so-called postrevolt kiva at Pecos was actually constructed almost a half-century before the Pueblo Revolt—apparently with the participation and approval of Franciscans. Perhaps the convento kiva at Pecos served as training rooms and chapels for mission neophytes—an initial training practice pursued “with great caution” of influential “principal caciques and captains of the pueblo” (Ivey 1998:22; see also Riley 1999:124; Weber 2009).

Ivey (1988, 1998) argues that the prerevolt convento kiva was not unique to Pecos, citing quite parallel structures documented at the Salinas missions of Abó and Quarai (Ivey 1988, 1998:134–38). The kiva at Abó (Figure 15.1) was precisely centered inside the garth (convento patio) during the construction of the first church in 1622–28. Construction of the second church, about 1647–52, disrupted the plan of the convent plaza, and the kiva was unroofed and intentionally filled (see Toulouse 1949 for an alternative interpretation invoking the Grand Narrative). A square convento kiva was also constructed in 1626 at nearby Quarai (Ivey 1988).³

Figure 15.1. Plan view of the Spanish mission at Abó (New Mexico) after its first reconstruction circa 1652. Note the circular “Franciscan kiva” (built between 1623 and 1645), carefully centered inside the convento, adjacent to the church (after Ivey et al. 1991:fig. 4; reproduced courtesy of the National Park Service).

Convento and Visita Kivas: Historicizing the Mission Experience

The fact of convento kivas underscores the importance of historicizing the colonial experience—not as a monolithic “clash of cultures,” but rather as an outcome of specific histories of “accommodation, alliance, ambiguity and ambivalence” on the part of active agents from diverse backgrounds (Liebmann and Murphy 2010:18).

Sometime after New Mexico shifted from a proprietary colony to a royal colony (in 1610), Franciscans followed a plan of more “careful integration” when establishing new mission churches. This was a time of deliberately increased religious tolerance, and there are several recorded cases of replacing friars who were too aggressive in handling neophytes (e.g., Kessell 1979:121; Ivey 1998:129–30, 148nn40, 41). During the interval 1610–45, colonial officials approved and encouraged construction of convento and visita kivas throughout the New Mexico Province, creating familiar places within the Franciscan mission space where children and others could be taught the basics of Christianity, the catechism, and Spanish culture. David Weber (2009:10–11) concurs, pointing out that (at least during in the early seventeenth century), Franciscans introduced churches into the Southwest only “gingerly” to avoid triggering a backlash among the Pueblos, who vastly outnumbered the newcomers, thus demonstrating “restraint and flexibility that had long European antecedents.”

The convento kiva is one of the many “creative architectural provisions” employed by Franciscans throughout the New World, including sixteenth-century “Franciscan mosques” in Mexico (Ivey 1998:123–24). Convento and visita kivas apparently went out of use sometime after 1645, in part because the missions of New Mexico were past the initial phases of proselytization. Spanish colonial policy stiffened further in the early 1660s, when Franciscans hardened their policies to suppress the Katsina activities at Isleta and Pecos, when “indigenous idols” were smashed and kivas deliberately destroyed (Kessell 1979:111; Ivey 1998:144,147n6; Brooks 2013).

Rejection of the Grand Narrative means that understanding the colonial period in the American Southwest no longer requires that either Pueblos or Franciscans have passive roles. The tired dominance/revolution dichotomy grew out an early twentieth-century reading of the documentary research. A more contemporary rereading of the same documents suggests some alternative interpretations, including the kiva as a hybrid colonial form.

The Mission Bell as Social Agent

Objects such as Mississippian tribute and Hopi textiles have genealogies and itineraries, some more generalized, but others quite specific and varied (Gosden and Marshall 1999:171). At different points in their life histories, these same objects may also be vested with transient values and meaning (Kopytoff 1986; Joyce 2012a; Joyce and Gillespie 2015; Mills and Walker 2008:10–11). The rest of this chapter considers some of the cultural itineraries experienced by selected mission bells in the American Southeast and Southwest.

Mission bells had a critical importance throughout Spanish American missions, with the churches sporting a campanario (or bell tower), which functioned as a “community timepiece” calling the faithful to their evening and morning devotions (Foster 1960:159; Bushnell 1994:82). Franciscan friar and historian Maynard Geiger described how the church bells ruled the Mission Santa Barbara (Alta California) landscape as they “proclaimed the Lord’s Day and feasts of saints. Their peels were heard on occasions of national rejoicing. They were rung to greet governors and other distinguished visitors. They lent a merry note to weddings, and in doleful tones lamented the departure from life of both the great and the humble. Thrice daily they called men to prayer ‘at morn, at noon, at eventide’ . . . in fact, the entire day at the missions was regulated by the bell: prayer, work, and sleep” (Geiger 1956:1). The tolling bells arranged the precisely timed life rhythms of the mission and its community of souls.

Consistent with long-term Spanish tradition, New World mission bells were consecrated and blessed in a ceremony similar to baptism—typically involving exorcisms; application of water, salt, and holy oils; bestowing of a Christian name (after a specific saint, but sometimes for living individuals); and the naming of godparents. One of the original church bells at Mission Santa Barbara (Alta California) was so “baptized” in 1833 during the wedding of Doña María de las Augustias de la Guerra, who became the madrina (godmother) to this bell (Walsh 1934:79).

The power of mission bells extends far beyond their role as community timekeeper, with the metonymic oppositions of “life under the bell” and “break up the bells” signaling their metaphorical life and death (after Kopytoff 1986; Gosden and Marshall 1999). Reflecting his personal Franciscan beliefs, Maynard Geiger described the ecclesiastical genealogies of church bells at Mission Santa Barbara (and elsewhere): “Some of the bells played themselves out in the faithful performance of their musical calling. Others sustained injury during the convulsions of nature. Some found an unmarked resting place. Many remain to tell the story of their happy usefulness. Some, while still speaking in silvery tones, are mute with regard to their origin. Thus bells, like humans, are a varied lot” (Geiger 1956:1; emphasis added).

Indeed, like humans, most mission bells led more complex existences than implied in a simple life-and-death dichotomy. Many church bells had colorful life histories, genealogies, and itineraries across the Spanish Borderlands. The church bells of Spanish Florida had such social agency that during a 1575 trip to the establish the earliest missions, friars found that merely touching a small bell attracted the caciques and their subordinates in great numbers, offering themselves for conversion and baptism (Bushnell 1994:42).

Life under the Bell (bajo campana)

The mission bell has been taken as a “metonym” —a figure of speech identifying thing or a concept not by its own name, but rather by something closely associated—for the entire Franciscan mission enterprise (Bushnell 1986). “Hollywood” is a common metonym denoting film industry in southern California and “the White House” often signals the executive branch of the United States government (if not the entire government itself).

The metonym bajo campana (beneath the bell) reflects the expectation throughout the Franciscan ecclesiastical world that the greater mission communities should live within earshot of the campanario. A 1688 account from St. Augustine (Spanish Florida) cautions that when neophyte Christians run off into the woods, every effort must be made to find and “reduce them under the bell of their doctrinas” (Bushnell 1994:96). The metonym “under the bell” has even achieved considerable currency in the archaeological literature of the Spanish Borderlands (e.g., Liebmann 2006, 2012:chap. 2; Lycett 2004; Milanich 2006:chap. 6;).

Putting the Bell into Rebellion

For friars and pro-Franciscan converts living within the “the missioned soundscape” (Mahar 2013), the church bell was a full-fledged member of the community, reflecting a power that blurred the lines between person and thing. But for anti-Christians living in these same communities, mission bells had become a nuisance—literally tolling every facet of their lives, tell them when to eat and sleep, wake and work, pray and attend mass.

Mission bells rang across the Pueblo world for eight decades, meaning that virtually every revolutionary in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 knew no other existence. These same mission bells were most famously contested by Po’pay, the Tewa firebrand from San Juan who urged the Pueblo rebels in 1680 to “break up and burn the images of the holy Christ, the Virgin Mary and the other saints, the crosses, and everything pertaining to Christianity . . . burn the temples, break up the bells, and separate from the wives whom God had given them in marriage and take those whom they desired” (Hackett and Shelby 1942:247; emphasis added). As the violent counterpart to “life under the bell,” the metonym of “breaking up the bells” has become a commonplace figure of speech to denote indigenous rebellions against Franciscan authority.

The materiality of both metonyms is confirmed across the Spanish Borderlands. As the Pueblo Revolt spread throughout the Southwest, mission bells were often yanked from the campanario and smashed to fragments; other cases, however, they were protected and revered (e.g., Brew 1949:56; Brooks 2013:756–57; Courlander 1971:163; Hackett and Shelby 1942:1:96, 2: 240; 2:203–6; Kessell, Hendricks, and Dodge 1992:549–550; Liebmann 2012:225n12: Lippard and Ranney 2010:202). Examples of both treatments:

Po’pay’s edict to “break up the bells” likewise has a distinct materiality.

For more than a century, archaeologists have found fractured mission bells at sites associated with the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Don Juan Oñate brought two church bells to New Mexico in 1598, and both were recovered in excavations near the site of San Gabriel (Howe 1956). R. G. Montgomery et al. (1949:55, fig. 6) illustrate the two bell fragments they found, superimposing the images on a church bell then hanging at Acoma; they argued that the Awat’ovi and Acoma mission bells had been cast in the same mold. Adolph Bandelier (1881:40–41) reported seeing a single bell fragment from the church at Pecos, and Alfred Kidder (1932:306) excavated eight additional mission bell fragments. Nels Nelson excavated a large mission bell fragment in at San Cristobal (Nelson 1914:59), as illustrated in Figure 15.2. Nelson also found another single mission bell fragment at San Marcos; my own excavations recovered five additional bell fragments (Ivey and Thomas 2005; Thomas 2014, n.d.). More than two dozen mission bell fragments are known from San Lazaro, including four refits and two showing damage from deliberate breakage (Fenn 2004:170–71, fig. 51, plates 111 and 112).

Figure 15.2. This mission bell was found at San Cristóbal Pueblo in New Mexico’s Galisteo Basin (Nelson 1914:59). The bell was almost certainly broken during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, then subsequently recovered and deliberately placed by pro-Franciscan factions within a “secret kiva” near the destroyed mission church (photograph by Nicholas Triozzi, courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History).

Each mission bell has a unique life history, and the best known of these come from Pecos and the Galisteo Basin, where the factionalism is well documented (Bandelier 1881; Brooks 2013; Kessell 1979:232; Levine 1999; Riley 1999:223), with pro-Franciscan neophytes living at the southern end of Pecos, literally in the shadows of the church, and more traditional anti-Hispanic factions residing in the older northern section (Liebmann, Preucel, and Aguilar, chapter 5 in this volume). Pecos remained a divided pueblo even after the Spaniards were gone in 1680 (Kessell 1979:7, 26, 223; Kidder 1958:1008).

The genealogies of these particular bell fragments are intriguing. After initial manufacture in a foundry, the bells of Pecos were sanctified by Franciscan ritual, then hung and rung in the campanario at Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de Porciúncula. Kidder (1932:306) is doubtless correct when concluding that the eight church bell fragments he recovered “date from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 when the mission was sacked.” But the perpetrator is unclear (perhaps the anti-Franciscan faction at Pecos, or perhaps Tanoans from the Galisteo Basin). Another Pecos bell was taken hostage by San Cristóbal rebels as a war trophy, then “killed” in the nearby mountains (Bandelier 1881). Figure 15.2 shows the bell piece found by Nelson in a “secret” mission-period kiva at San Cristóbal, where it was apparently being venerated. Nelson (1914:57–59) mused over whether the Pecos and San Cristóbal bell fragments might match up, and we’re currently working on such possibilities (Thomas 2014, n.d.).

These object itineraries echo the words of Po’pay about “breaking up the bells” and tell conflicted tales about the internal civil war waged during and after the Pueblo Revolt. While I am unaware of precisely parallel oratory from the Southeastern Borderlands, that same metonymic refrain to “break up the bells” must have resonated in the Muskogean and Apalachee languages because violently fractured bell fragments marked the advent of indigenous uprisings across La Florida (e.g., Francis and Kole 2011; Jones 1970; Jones and Shapiro 1990; Thomas 1988, 2014, 2015).

The Mission Bells of Santa Catalina de Guale

So it is that powerful, singularized objects such as mission bells accumulate histories reflecting the social processes of value creation between people and things: “As people and objects gather time, movement and change, they are constantly transformed, and these transformations of person and object are tied up with one another” (Gosden and Marshall 1999:169–70). Relating materiality to their life histories, it is possible to track the making and unmaking of objects through recourse to so-called fragmentation theory by exploring breakage patterns evident in the archaeological record (Chapman 2000; Chapman and Gaydarska 2006; Knappett 2012:199).

The importance of a signal object and its fragmentation was manifestly obvious during our excavations at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale (1570–1680), where we recovered 163 bronze church bell fragments from the mission complex on St. Catherines Island (Georgia). Most of the bell fragments came from the atrio immediately outside the church doorway, throughout the central mission plaza, and along the eastern wall of the friary; a few came from the surrounding pueblo part of the mission. Each bell fragment from Mission Santa Catalina has a specific “object provenience”—the original “find spot,” documented in detail during the excavation process (Bushnell 1994; Thomas 1988, 1993).

Understanding the genealogies and itineraries of these objects requires a close consideration of object provenance as well—clarifying the sequences of ownership and meaning, ideally from creation through the social lives and circulation to establish networks of connections between persons and these things (Blair 2015a, 2015b; Chapman 2000; Joyce 2012a, 2012b: 8). Here is my reconstruction of the multifarious itineraries and genealogies of the mission bells of Santa Catalina de Guale, from the sixteenth century to today.

Bells: From Commodities to Singularized Objects

When Pedro Menéndez de Avilés sailed in 1565 to establish the St. Augustine colony and the attendant mission chains, he loaded eight church bells aboard San Pelayo, his flagship. A hurricane struck while the great ship was unloading and heretic mutineers took control, immediately setting set sail for Europe. San Pelayo and its remaining cargo sank somewhere off the coast of Denmark—perhaps with the mission bells still on board (Bushnell 1986; Lyon 1976:91, 128). Maybe those bells still lie at the bottom of the North Sea, but it is also possible that one (or more) one of them ended up at missions on the Georgia Coast.

One way or another, the bells of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale began their cultural itinerary in a European foundry. As commodities, these bells circulated through the economic system and were exchanged for other things, usually money (Kopytoff 1986:64–68). One such client was His Majesty, the king of Spain, who provided all new colonial missions with a “start-up kit” containing the means necessary to conduct divine worship—especially the vestments, ornaments, and mission bells, plus remittances for the sacraments (Bushnell 1994:84).

Somewhere between foundry and campanario, the church bells destined for doctrinal service at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale were transformed through liturgical protocols from the realm of economic commodities to the world of inalienable power. Like Spanish tribute items being transformed into ritualized chiefly Mississippian prestige items, these large bells became “singularized” through Franciscan ritual practice into priceless noncommodities, reflecting the extension of sacred power projected onto “sacralized objects” (Kopytoff 1986:64–68, 73–75).

Franciscan Fray Maynard Geiger (quoted earlier) lyrically expressed how the mission bells of Santa Barbara were “singularized” through baptism and naming, creating distinct object identities and preparing each bell to fulfill its own unique destiny. But Franciscan missions are, by definition and design, multicultural communities with social agency articulated by both colonizer and colonized. Archaeologists must be mindful when such powerful, singularized objects are employed in a colonial setting, because multiple agencies and contingencies are likely in play.

With respect to native North America, María Nieves Zedeño (2009) could identify only a “handful” of such inherently powerful and singularized objects, which she calls index objects, with the potential for revealing “relational ontologies [in which] animate objects can and do establish social relationships that parallel those of human social systems” (Zedeño 2009:413). Index objects can and often do speak a universal language of power; indigenous leaders and Franciscan authorities recognized the importance of such ritualized index objects—whether items of tribute or mission bells—in cementing cross-cultural relations in New Spain. In both cases, these priceless noncommodities played agential roles in modifying human behavior and social relations in Mississippian Spanish Florida (see also Brown and Walker 2008:298).

A 1682 court case ruled that local Guale and Timucuan caciques actually “owned” the mission bells of La Florida. When the doctrina of San Salvador de Mayaca was abandoned, friars gathered up the sacred furnishings (including two church bells) and took them away for safekeeping. But local caciques argued that “His Majesty made the grant … of the said ornaments and bells to their pueblo and no other.” Although temporarily without a friar, the caciques asserted that the neophyte community would still get another, and in the meantime, they still owned the bells—gifts so powerful they could not be withdrawn simply because the Indians and the friar chose to close that particular mission (Bushnell 1986, 1994:155, 159; 2014).

This episode highlights the importance of viewing colonial practice not in terms of the Grand Narratives, superposition or syncretism, but rather through an expanded multicultural context where practical politics play out. These sometimes novel, hybrid formulations crosscut indigenous American and European linguistic and religious ideologies—materialized in a uniquely singular index objects such as the mission bells.

For a century, off and on, the bells of Santa Catalina served their agreed-upon, multicultural role—to hang in the campanario and ritually regulate the lives of those who elected to “live under the bell.” But this practice was contested by many others, in several ways.

Recommodifying the Santa Catalina Bells

The mission bell and the artillery cannon are “technological twins,” in that either can be melted down and recast to assume the form and function of the other (Bushnell 1994:163–65). As Spain’s military prowess grew, artisans working in the foundries became national resources, shifting as necessary from casting church bells to casting guns. When Spain ventured onto the global stage as a military power, many church bells were melted down and cast into cannons, with the naming tradition sometimes carrying over to the new firearms.

Pirates plying the La Florida coastline knew this as well. During a 1683 raid on St. Augustine, Governor Juan Marques Cabrera and his troops took refuge inside the castillo fortress. Recognizing the scarcity and market value of bronze, the pirates diverted to nearby missions San Juan and San Phelipe, where they stole six mission bells, presumably to be melted down (“recommodified”) into a cannon (after Kopytoff 1986:82). Ironically, the bells stolen from the Guale and Mocamo missions may not have been recast. A Spanish spy saw intact mission bells in Charles Town in 1687, and the governor of Florida used this as evidence that the British were providing safe harbor to pirates. If so, the bells of Guale may have been more valuable as (noncommodity) trophies of war than as (recommodified) cannon.

The singularized, sacred role of mission bells was contested on other fronts as well. Bells were rung at all public occasions in St. Augustine and elsewhere throughout Spanish Florida, and at times they figured prominently in the power struggles between the sacred and secular sectors of the Spanish community. Bushnell (1994:150), for example, describes the 1681 “showdown at Sapelo.” Captain Francisco de Fuentes (a veteran of the defense of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale a year before) complained that he and his men rushed to arms on Sapelo Island when they heard a bell signaling the tocsin (an alarm and call to arms) only to find the fiscal calling the mission women together to grind corn at the convento. In the ensuing dispute between Friar Juan de Useda and Captain Fuentes, voices were raised and tempers flared; Fuentes was ultimately excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church for this (and other disputes) with the Franciscans.

Killing and Resurrecting the Bells of Santa Catalina

Rebellious Guale Indians murdered the church bells at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale in October 1597. At least three mission bells were broken into hundreds of fragments and apparently broadcast across the smoldering ruins of Mission Santa Catalina. Kopytoff (1986:76) calls this “deactivation,” signaling the transition from a singularized “priceless” noncommodity into worthless junk. Intriguingly, these bells were killed not by local Guale neophytes, who literally lived under the same bells; these church bells of Mission Santa Catalina were destroyed instead by enemy Guale from a rival non-Christian chiefdom, who also killed five Franciscans (including Fray Miguel de Auñón and Fray Antonio Badajoz, both stationed at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale). These rebellious Guale ransacked Franciscan missions along the Georgia coastline, not only burning churches and breaking bells, but also torching the rival Guale council houses and cacique residences along the way.⁴

Franciscans returned to Guale territory nearly a decade after the rebellion, in March 1606, to refurbish Mission Santa Catalina de Guale and establish four new missions as well (Blair 2015b; Blair and Thomas 2014;Francis and Kole 2011:7). Over the next seven decades, members of the Santa Catalina de Guale mission community collected four dozen pieces of the bells fragmented in 1597, stacking them against the back wall of the new convento. These bell fragments were almost certainly being stockpiled for recasting into rebaptized replacement bells (and a quantity of bronze slag suggests that perhaps new bells were being recast on St. Catherines Island). In the meantime, replacement mission bells rang over Mission Santa Catalina de Guale until 1680, when the mission site was attacked once again, this time by slave raiders from Charlestown. After the enemy retreated, the friars and neophytes at Mission Santa Catalina fled southward to the adjacent Sapelo Island, apparently taking their replacement church bells with them (Bushnell 1994:163).

The 163 bell fragments were left behind where they had symbolically perished in the attack of 1597. Like the martyred brothers Michael and Antonio who died at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale that same day, the church bells were victims of deadly internecine warfare between rival Guale polities. The bells were broken up and tossed around while the priests were butchered on the spot, then hastily buried.

The Bells of Santa Catalina in the Twenty-First Century

With the Franciscan abandonment in 1680, the whereabouts of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale was unknown until 1979, when archaeologists from the American Museum of Natural History found the site and dug there for two decades (Thomas 1988, 1993, 2014). The bell fragments, now perceived as archaeological artifacts, were transported to laboratories New York City, where they remained until 2005, when the entire archaeological assemblage from Mission Santa Catalina was gifted to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History (in Atlanta, reflecting the premise that “what comes from Georgia stays in Georgia”).

In 1984, the archaeological ruins of the church at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale were reconsecrated by the Franciscan Order and the Savannah Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church (Judge 1988; Thomas 2014, 2015). Today, (Franciscan) Bishop Gregory Hartmayer is promoting The Cause of the Georgia Martyrs, which seeks sainthood for the five Franciscans killed in the Guale Uprising of 1597. Their bones, if they could found, could become saintly in the eyes of the Vatican, human relics “fully capable of saving thousands of lives” (Fr. Conrad Harkins, personal communication, 1985).

Some Conclusions

I have drawn upon several themes addressed in the other contributions to this volume, stressing particularly how materiality and social agency played out in the “practical politics” at the edges of Spanish Borderlands (after Silliman 2001). Exploring the “archaeologies of persistence” (Panich 2013:17) emphasizes the variability in how communities negotiated their colonial world, which are (by definition and design) cross-cultural—with social agency articulated by both colonizer and colonized. Throughout, I have stressed the importance of viewing colonial practice not in terms of Grand Narratives, superposition or syncretism, but rather through the expanded multicultural contexts where decision making, accommodation, resistance, and compromise played out.

This chapter highlights the remarkable contrasts between the respective indigenous landscapes in the Southwest and Southeast. The Pueblo world had long resisted top-down authority and with the insertion of Spanish colonial ways, factions in most communities contesting how best to address the changes all around them. Some, particularly those excluded from higher levels knowledge of ritual knowledge and power, embraced innovation and newer ideas. Others chose to reiterate what had been done previously.

Practical politics and social agency cut both ways in colonial communities, and Franciscans across the Borderlands vacillated over how best to achieve their divine mandate to save indigenous souls. Colonial authorities in La Florida deliberately bolstered and reinforced long-term hierarchical structure of hereditary Mississippian micos, who retained a large measure of secular autonomy. The factionalism of colonial Pueblo society lacks a counterpart in Spanish Florida, where indigenous communities were known for their loyalty and protectiveness of chiefly authority. But the paramounts across Spanish Florida competed viciously with one another to curry favor with the Franciscan authorities. Spanish colonial–Mississippian hybrids provided an external support system for hereditary chiefs who maintained time-worn practices of traditional rank and privilege, even in the face of the withering demographics.

I have particularly foregrounded the Guale Rebellion of 1597 and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 as complex and violent affairs, at times pitting rival indigenous factions and sometimes polities against a backdrop of adaptations and negotiations. Franciscans and indigenous leaders died in both uprisings, but for very different reasons.

Attempting to ground these events materially, I have explored cultural biographies of some uniquely singular index objects from repurposed kivas and council houses, pelota and Katsina ritualism, to sanctified tribute items and the omnipresent mission bells. These sometimes novel, hybrid formulations crosscut indigenous American and European linguistic and religious ideologies. Archaeologists must be particularly mindful when powerful, singularized objects are employed in colonial settings, because multiple agencies and contingencies might well be in play.

And yet, the selected object itineraries reflect remarkably comparable conflicts and legacies, dramatically underscoring the colonial reality that “messages of violence were directed at other indigenous people, not simply the Spanish” (Pearsall 2013:1017). Church bells were murdered at Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de Pórciuncula (Pecos Pueblo) and at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale (St. Catherines Island)—eighty-three years and 2,500 miles apart—but the perpetrators were not locals fed up with living under these bell. Rather, these bells were broken up by rival indigenous factions and long-term chiefly enemies driven to punish their pro-Franciscan relatives with an unmistakable show of anti-Spanish force. Ironically, battered bell fragments in both the Southwest and the Southeast were sometimes collected, curated, and venerated, perhaps in the unlikely hope that one of contested bells might one day ring out again.