Colonization and the Spread of Disease in the Rio Grande Drainage

Chapters on Sickness
Memory in Athens
A History of Epidemics
Colonization
Scientific Modeling

In the sixteenth century, the Rio Grande drainage in what is today New Mexico , was home to some 75 to 90 occupied pueblos. By 1643, four and a half decades after Spanish colonization, 43 remained. The story of this dramatic population decline and reorganization is one of disease, violence, enslavement, and environmental degradation. It is also a story of Indigenous survivance in the greater Southwest: a story of resistance, resilience, mobility, and cultural creativity in the face of tremendous hardship.
This story of indigenous population decline is told across the Americas after the arrival of colonists beginning in AD 1492. Recent scholarship indicates that demographic catastrophes occurred at different times in different regions of North America, fueled by a variety of factors. Important among these is the impact of communicable diseases, including viruses such as measles and smallpox, which had originated in Afro-Eurasia (the so-called Old World or Eastern Hemisphere), and were brought to the Americas (also referred to as the New World or Western Hemisphere) and Oceania by conquerors and colonists.
Epidemics are common throughout human history – as vulnerable individuals succumb to newly introduced diseases to which they have no resistance. Even in cases where many die from a new disease, populations normally rebound after a disease cycle has ended and sufficient members of a community develop resistance. For example, the (bacterially induced) waves of bubonic plague in the 14th century are estimated to have killed 30-50% of Europe’s population (read the forthcoming chapter on the plague, forthcoming, check back!);  though population size rebounded in much of Europe within 80 years.
In New Mexico, what anthropologist Debra Martin has referred to as the “creeping genocide” of colonialism long delayed such a population rebound even as communities in the Pueblo Southwest resisted and persisted in their indigenous homelands.

Martin notes:

In the Pueblo Southwest, it is clear that while indigenous people did suffer from sporadic and variable waves of epidemics … small- scale warfare, burning at the stake, taking of lands, fragmentation of communities, extraction of labor and taxes, use of captives and slaves for labor, and extreme forms of missionization and assimilation are important forces to consider in the ultimate transformation, subordination, and depopulation of groups in the Southwest (Martin 2015: 102).

In New Mexico, epidemic diseases appear to have taken hold many decades after initial Spanish arrival in the region with the establishment of colonial rule and missionization.  Although the first Spanish presence in the region occurred in AD 1539, the first epidemics documented in writing first appear in Jesuit missionary records from in the early 1600s, as missions were established, and the number of colonists grew.  Franciscan records document a devastating epidemic of “smallpox and the sickness of which the Mexican called cocoliztli [typhus]” that decimated Pueblo communities in 1636, followed by another widespread smallpox epidemic four years later in 1640.

Population decline in the Jemez Province
The Jemez region was a center of Ancestral Puebloan settlement in the centuries before Spanish arrival, with more than 30 villages or masonry pueblos and 3000 field houses known from AD 1300-1600. Archaeologist Matthew Liebmann and his colleagues have traced the history of 18 large villages that they estimate were home to 5000-8000 people at around AD 1500. More than a century later, Franciscan friar Geronome Zárate Salmerón, who was in Jemez between 1621 and 1626 similarly reported the presence of 6566 “souls.” Over the next 20 years following missionization, epidemic diseases, famine, and violence took their toll. Missionary records report a population of 3,000 by 1630, and only 1,860 by 1644.
In 1630, missionary Fray Alonso de Benavides, who had overseen Franciscan missions throughout New Mexico from 1626 to 1629,  returned to Spain and presented a written report to King Philip IV. He wrote of the Jemez nation:

These people had been scattered all about this kingdom when I arrived as custodian, and their lands were nearly deserted due to hunger and war. These two plagues were finishing them off. …. And although over half of this nation has died, Your Majesty may still count here on more than three thousand newly assembled taxpayers.

Numerous settlements in the Jemez region were abandoned and by 1681 the entire population, of fewer than 900 people, resided in the settlement of Patokwa – an astounding and ghastly 87% decline in 60 years.

Resistance, Persistence and Ceramic Design in the Salinas Province
The eradication of Pueblo religious practices and beliefs was a high priority in Spanish colonization in New Mexico. Indeed, 15 Franciscan friars accompanied Juan de Oñate as he established colonial rule in 1598. More than four dozen more arrived over the next three decades. Pueblo people were conscripted into the building of mission churches and settlements; missionaries destroyed thousands of religious objects; religious leaders were suppressed, and dances and ceremonies forbidden (read the chapter on the Jingle Dress Dance here, and the chapter on dance and the dancing plague, also forthcoming, check back!).

Revolts and acts of resistance were widespread among pueblo communities throughout the 17th century, culminating in one of the most significant revolts in New Mexican History and North American Indigenous resistance, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.  Archaeologist Jeannette Mobley-Tanaka documented a subtle but powerful form of resistance among female potters producing glaze ware bowls used in ceremonial feast in the Salinas region during the colonial period. Specifically, designs with religious significance become simplified and abstracted, and the glaze paints they were applied with was “runny,” effectively obscuring the motifs after firing.  The vessels retain their symbolic power, as the women making them “masked” the motifs underneath the runny glaze. Only knowledgeable viewers would be able to recognize their presence and meaning.

Author: Carla Sinopoli

References
Matthew Liebmann, 2012, Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Matthew J. Liebmann, Joshua Farella, Christopher I. Roos, Adam Stack, Sarah Martini and Thomas W Swetnam. 2016. Native American depopulation, reforestation, and fire regimes in the Southwest United States, 1492-1900 CE. PNAS February 9, 2016 113 (6) E696-E704.

Debra Martin, 2015, Beyond epidemics: a bioarchaeological perspective on Pueblo-Spanish encounters in the American Southwest.  In, Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America, edited by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton and Alan Swedlund, pp. 99-118. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Jeannette Mobley-Tanaka, 2002, Crossed cultures, crossed meanings: the manipulation of ritual imagery in Early Historic Pueblo resistance. In, Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt: Identity, Meaning, and Renewal in the Pueblo World, ed. by R.W. Preucel, pp. 77-84. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Katherine A. Spielmann, Jeannette Mobley-Tanaka, and James M. Pottery, 2006, Style and resistance in the seventeenth century Salinas Province. American Antiquity 71(4): 621-647.

The Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides 1630. Translated by Mrs. Edward E. Ayer. Annotated by Frederic Webb Hodge and Charles Flectcher Lummis. Chicago. 1916.

Colonization Sub-Chapters
A Global Story
The Virgin of Guadalupe
The Rio Grande Drainage