David Hurst Thomas and the Historical Archaeology of the Spanish Borderlands

James E. Snead

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
14 (Summer 2000). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 2000, Organization of American Historians
 

A few months later, in New York, where Thomas is the curator of North American archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History, the practical questions of fieldwork have given way to the less tractable issue of the relationship between history and archaeology. In the United States the two are very much separate disciplines, with their own traditions and jealously guarded prerogatives. In popular conception, archaeologists study Pre-Columbian Native America, while historians examine the colonizers of the subsequent age. Archaeologists base their interpretations on studies of material remains, and historians rely on documentary sources. The differences in perspective are profound, despite a mutual concern with the interpretation of the past. Traditionally, where archaeology and history have come together, such as in the creation of Colonial Williamsburg, archaeologists have functioned as technical experts, providing a reconstructed stage on which historical scenes can be enacted.

In recent decades, however, scholars from different disciplines and institutions have built intellectual bridges between history and archaeology, a movement in which Thomas is in the vanguard. He was raised in the San Francisco Bay area, and was drawn to archaeology from his earliest years. In California, the most prominent monuments of the past are the colonial missions, and Thomas remembers traveling up and down California with his family to visit them all. Continued interest in archaeology derailed a planned pre-med curriculum at the University of California, Davis, but Thomas applied his mathematical and scientific acumen to his new career. His first job as an archaeologist was on a historic-period excavation in Old Sacramento. Although he subsequently moved on to prehistoric sites in the American West, in the process earning a reputation for rigorous, quantitative methods, Thomas kept track of ongoing research in the California missions.

Shortly after he moved to New York in 1974, the opportunity to begin his own borderlands project presented itself. Instead of California, however, the new initiative was set in the Southeast, where the American Museum of Natural History was invited to run a research program on St. Catherine's Island off the Georgia coast. The work, initially begun as a study of the prehistoric cultures of the region, eventually shifted focus towards solving one of the abiding mysteries of Spanish colonial history in the Southeast: the location of Santa Catalina de Guale, one of the most prominent coastal settlements of the seventeenth century. Scholars were in general agreement that the mission had been on St. Catherine's Island, but no one knew exactly where, nor what it would have looked like. Without any evident ruins, the location of the mission was a mystery.

At first, the issue was largely technical: finding the missing mission. In this effort Thomas was able to draw on his considerable experience in archaeological surveying and conducted an island-wide sampling program. This strategy isolated a single, hundred-meter-square area that contained fragments of majolica (a distinctive earthenware ceramic used throughout the Spanish colonial world) and other, colonial-period artifacts; but no structural remains were visible in the dense underbrush. At this point, the team switched to the use of new, remote-sensing technology. Scanning the area with a device known as a proton magnetometer, the team members were able to identify magnetic anomalies below the ground surface that would have been caused by intense heat at some time in the past. Thomas knew that Santa Catalina de Guale had been destroyed by fire, which would have baked the wattle-and-daub architecture traditional in coastal Georgia and created just the kind of pattern the instruments were revealing. He excavated at the locations of the three most significant "blips" on the magnetometry charts, and came directly down on a mission-period well, a convento kitchen, and the mission church itself. He had found Santa Catalina de Guale.

As research continued on the island, Thomas found himself drawn into the intellectual issues raised by mission archaeology. In many ways, the development of historical archaeology in the borderlands reflects the American public's changing attitudes toward Spanish colonialism. Archaeology, says Thomas, is conditioned by social expectations. In California, the restoration of the missions as cultural monuments at the turn of the century made archaeology, in the eyes of many, irrelevant. Anglo-American myth making about California's Hispanic heritage created a pervasive image of the past to which the spades of archaeologists could contribute little. Although a lot of digging took place in California, the results were rarely used to address important historical issues. In the Southeast, by contrast, the early demise of the Spanish colonies and an absence of monuments created opportunities both for archaeologists and others who saw value in this forgotten past. Different interest groups often clashed, however, over interpretations and priorities. In the 1930s a campaign to anoint a group of nineteenth-century ruins on the South Carolina coast as relics of the Spanish period--and hence as valuable tourist attractions--was debunked by archaeologists, ironically discrediting mission archaeology in the region for decades. Only with the emergence of a new generation of scholars, armed with new methods and orientations, has the relevance of archaeology for addressing historical problems been firmly established.

For Thomas, it is archaeology's potential for opening the historical record to new voices that is particularly exciting. The documentary sources used by historians interested in the Georgia missions, for example, are few, and those are generally reports and commentaries sent to colonial officials and church authorities back in Spain. The biases in such evidence are clear. The success or failure of a mission such as Santa Catalina had political implications for the Franciscans who maintained it, and their agenda is reflected in their accounts of conversions, baptisms, and the extirpation of native rituals. While these reports reflect currents in the colonial realm of La Florida and beyond, their reliability for describing conditions on the local level are suspect. What Santa Catalina offered, in contrast, was an opportunity to study the aboriginal and Franciscan components of the colonial record from the ground up.

Thomas says that today, archaeology offers the chance to "bring Indians into the equation." "How is it," he asks rhetorically, "that these two barefoot friars are keeping a thousand Indians in line?" Traditional models infer remarkably passive indigenous populations, assumptions that are no longer tenable. The answer, according to Thomas, lies in new perspectives on Native American-Spanish interaction that are emerging from the minutiae of the archaeological record at places like Santa Catalina. Burials found within the mission church, for instance, contain both Christian and traditional paraphernalia, indicating a certain level of accommodation in religious practices. While the Guale people clearly accepted some elements of the new ideology, they did it on their own terms. The mission structures themselves also suggest a process of accommodation, with the rigid planning of the church and convento adapted to the requirements of local building techniques. In the end, Thomas believes, Native American leaders saw working with Spanish missionaries as a way to acquire useful material goods and a means to enhance their own status in the community. The leaders of the Guale, he says, were "using the mission system to maintain their autonomy and authority." When viewed as decision-making strategies and without the hindsight of historical inevitability, these alliances were an entirely logical adaptation to the changing circumstances brought about by the arrival of the Spanish.

Developing ideas about Native American-Spanish interaction at Santa Catalina required a diverse research team. In addition to his archaeological crew and technical specialists, Thomas worked with ethnohistorians, biological anthropologists, and even priests. Franciscan participants at Santa Catalina have cleared up questions that mystified the archaeologists, such as identifying a clay basin unearthed in the convento as a "foot font," common in monasteries where shoes are forbidden. Thomas's work is highly regarded by the church as well, and he was recently awarded the Franciscan Medal for his exploration of mission history.

While the analysis of materials from Santa Catalina continues in Thomas's New York laboratory, he has begun to look for new settings in which to test his ideas about the mission period. This led him to Pueblo San Marcos, located not far from Santa Fe, New Mexico, site of brief excavations by the American Museum in 1915. As at Santa Catalina, the mission at San Marcos was built within an indigenous community of substantial size and prosperity. Most of the ruin is now owned by the Archaeological Conservancy, an organization that purchases archaeological sites to preserve them from development. In terms of modern perceptions of the mission past as well as its archaeological remains, however, the Southwest is a dramatic change from the Southeast. The substantial Hispanic population of the state takes considerable pride in its history. Tension between this perspective and that of the Native American communities in the area, which have their own views of the legacy of San Marcos and the other missions, creates potential pitfalls for archaeologists. Although earlier in the century many of the missions were excavated and restored, scholarly interest lapsed and has only recently been revived. Thomas sees both challenge and opportunity in the new project, and has assembled his team to put the plan into action.

Results of the first two seasons at San Marcos support his optimism that excavations at the site will make a substantial contribution to the history of the borderlands. As at Santa Catalina, remote-sensing technology was used to identify the portion of the vast ruin that was used for the mission. Initial excavations suggest that considerable evidence for seventeenth-century life has been preserved within the adobe church and convento, destroyed following the Pueblo revolt in 1680. Visitors to the site range from historians of the colonial period and local archaeologists to Santa Fe residents curious about the past of their own community. A group of Hispanic santeros (artists specializing in sacred images) came to San Marcos one day and provided an important clue to discoveries inside the church. "We told them how surprised we were by the sheets of mica we were finding, apparently part of the church decoration," Thomas says, "and they reminded us of how marvelous it all would have looked, glittering in the candlelight."

Reflecting on the future of the San Marcos project, Thomas recalls a meeting twenty-five years ago when he was challenged by historians to describe any useful contributions that archaeology had made to the study of the Spanish Borderlands. At the time, he recalls, he had little to say, but his work since then has been an answer. And now, after considerable research by other archaeologists, his own successes at Santa Catalina behind him, and the promise of San Marcos ahead, Thomas thinks the case has been made. Seen from both university windows and the piñon-covered hillsides of the Southwest, the relationship between archaeology and history in the borderlands has been placed on firm ground (1). q

1. For further reading on David Hurst Thomas's work at Santa Catalina de Guale, see his St. Catherine's: An Island In Time (Atlanta: Georgia Humanities Council, 1988); and Clark Larsen, ed., The Archaeology of Santa Catalina de Guale, vol. 2, Biocultural Interpretations of a Population in Transition (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1990). For Thomas's views on the relationship between history and archaeology in the borderlands, see David Hurst Thomas, "Cubist Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands: Past, Present, and Future," in Columbian Consequences, vol. 3, The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective, ed. David Hurst Thomas (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), xv-xxi.

James E. Snead is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. An archaeologist by training, Snead received his Ph.D. from UCLA and taught at the University of Arizona. He has won residential fellowships at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and at the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. His first book, Ruins and Rivals: The Making of Southwest Archeology, is to be published in 2001 by the University of Arizona Press.