Kachina and the Cross (29 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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BOOK: Kachina and the Cross
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Page 145
important in the political life of Santa Fe (see chapter 7). Several other sites can be found in the general Cienega region, including sites LA 16, LA 16,768, and LA 16,773.
East of Tomé in the Rio Abajo is another large site, that of Comanche Spring (LA 14,904). This ruin was claimed by its excavator to be early seventeenth century. It contains two complexes of rooms, one on either side of Comanche Creek at a point just a few miles from where the stream devolves from the Manzano Mountains. Archaeologists today do not consider the site securely dated, though more recent, limited archaeological work does suggest that a late-seventeenth-century date is quite feasible.
Dwellings in seventeenth-century New Mexico consisted of square or rectangular rooms made either of stone and mud mortar or of adobes with floors of clay. There was some use of logs, but this type of construction was normally limited to outbuildings. In any case, much of the settlement area was probably somewhat deficient in trees of the size needed for log cabins. Occasionally there would be jacal-type structures but, again, usually in pens or corrals.
The houses were basically home for extended families, and they tended to grow by adding contiguous rooms as time went on and the family grew larger. Sometimes round defensive towers of stone or adobe were added to the cluster of rooms. In the Cochiti area, at Las Majadas site (LA 591), there was a corral as well as outbuildings that may have been used by servants. At Las Majadas, a series of early-to middle-seventeenth-century glazes were found, including pottery made at Pecos, and several sherds of a Hopi Sikyatki Polychrome vessel, probably from a soup plate. A considerable amount of Pueblo culinary wares were found, and sherds of seventeenth-century Mexican majolica. Though privies have been identified in conventos, none have been found in any of the seventeenth-century homesteads. In modern rural northern Mexico, the corral is often the designated latrine area, and perhaps this was the case here. Chamber pots, constructed of pottery or even copper or silver, were likely also used, at least by the upper classes.
One curious aspect of New Mexico demography was the reluctance in both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries for colonists to cluster in defensible towns. Governors and regional alcaldes tried again and again to promote such settlements but met constant resistance from the settlers. It is not entirely clear why this was the case, but perhaps the colonists felt that they could exploit the local terrain better in dispersed settlements. This preference for isolated homesteads added to the difficulties of the Spaniards in trying to establish post-Pueblo Revolt settlements along the Rio Grande between Socorro and El Paso, an area highly vulnerable to raiding Indians. In seventeenth-century New Mexico, with its very scanty population spread thinly over the countryside, there
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was often no realistic alternative to isolated settlements. Of course, in the seventeenth century the estancieros and encomenderos had houses in Santa Fe and lived there intermittently.
Interior walls were whitewashed with a mixture of pulverized gypsum, wheat flour, and water. Not all rooms were heated, but some were fitted with a corner fireplace resting on a hearth six to eight inches high. If a second fireplace was needed, it was placed kitty-corner to the first. The fireplaces were fueled by wood, or occasionally charcoal, and cooking was done with a three-stone arrangement, the stones holding pottery vessels or comales. Doors were fitted with a round wooden peg placed in sockets in the lintel and sill to allow the door to swing back and forth. Iron in the New Mexico colony was much valued and quite scarce, so, understandably, hinges, locks, or latches of that metal were rare. Windows were usually small and might be covered with a cotton cloth or with selenite. Furniture in the rooms was quite scanty. There might be a mealing bin, placed in one of the corners. Crude handmade benches and tables probably made up the balance of furniture. Storage space was created by shelving. This usually took the form of a rough plank, set high above the floor and extending from wall to wall.
In semiarid New Mexico, water was always a consideration. In many cases, building was along or near living streams or springs. The settlement at Comanche Springs had both: a perennial stream, Comanche Creek, and flowing springs that devolved on a headland just south of the southernmost living area. Sometimes it was necessary to utilize temporary pools of water in marshy areas or ones formed by depressions in sandstone outcroppings. We have no evidence for wells in the seventeenth century, although an occasional one might have been dug in the valley bottoms. In any case, water was brought to the houses in Pueblo-made pottery vessels or
tinajas
, or in wooden buckets. Washing of clothing mostly took place in irrigation ditches or along the streams. Soap was somewhat scarce in the seventeenth century, though a certain amount was brought up in the mission trains from the early days of settlement of New Mexico. In the initial Oñate expedition, Captain Alonso de Quesada listed one hundred bars of soap, along with towels and sheets. At some point a local soap industry may have developed, but virtually nothing is known about it.
Yucca glauca
, soapweed yucca, was also used.
Pottery used by the colonists from Oñate's time to the Pueblo Revolt was overwhelmingly produced by Pueblo Indians, though it was often fashioned in non-indigenous forms such as plates, candlesticks, footed cups, goblets, and others. One of the Spanish majolica wares, called Pueblo Polychrome, had designs copied from Spanish lace, originally appearing on women's dresses. These
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designs seem to have fascinated the Pueblo potters, for they reproduced the semicircular lace patterns in their own pottery. Handled cups are prehistoric in the Southwest, but in the seventeenth century, under Spanish influence, these greatly increased in number.
Food for the Spanish colonists included not only the native maize, beans, and squash but such introduced plants as wheat, barley, plums, peaches, grapes, onions, radishes, lettuce, cabbage, carrots, peas and chickpeas, and other vegetables as well as watermelons and cantaloupes. Condiments included garlic, cumin, coriander, and chile. The turkey continued to be used, and new domesticated animals included sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, and chickens. Dogs were surely used in herding activities as well as to protect the homes, and cats most likely were brought from Mexico to help control the rodent population. There is, however, curiously little information on these animals (see chapter 12 for further discussion).
There was an explosive spread of sheep in New Mexico from herds introduced during the Oñate period, and by the time of the Pueblo Revolt there were certainly tens of thousands of these animals. Sheep are rapid breeders, reaching puberty in five to seven months. A ewe has a gestation period of less than five months, and from birth to the next estrus is only around thirty-five daysthus she can have two pregnancies per year over a productive life span of six to eight years. It seems to be the case that the majority of flocks were owned by the missionaries, but certainly sheep, like other herd animals, were available to the settlers. The popular churro sheep had an adult weight from sixty-five to eighty pounds and produced somewhere between one and two pounds of rough but usable wool per year. Clothing for the less-affluent settler was of wool, and the Spaniards introduced the indigo plant in order to dye the local wool a deep blue. There may also have been some use of cotton, traded from the Pueblo Indians. Aside from cloth, from Oñate's time there was an increasing use of tanned skins of deer and antelope. These were easily available, and skin clothing was warm in the winter. Local tanning skills were encouraged by the fact that these skins, and the clothing made from them, were in great demand farther south in Nueva Vizcaya. An October 1641 inventory of merchandise following the death of a small store owner in Parral brings to light a chamois jacket and two small blankets from New Mexico. The jacket could have been made from sheep or goat hide, or it might have been from a deerskin. The blankets were probably wool. They were handpainted with pictures of the Virgin Mary and of St. Nicholas and perhaps originated in the mission workshops. Although these were the only goods specifically indicated from New Mexico, it seems likely that a number of the other items from that inventory and a second one dated December of that year (from a merchant living about twelve miles from Parral) were from the
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province. For example, the inventory lists included salt and about two and a half bushels of piñon seeds (nuts). Both items were plentiful in the province and important in the New Mexico "balance of trade," with piñon nuts considered a special delicacy in Mexico. The two and a half bushels mentioned in the inventory would retail for perhaps twenty-five pesos.
The field plots used by the colonists were plowed with a simple wooden plow, aptly described by R. F. Dickey:
Local farmers constructed a much simplified version of the old European plow, and this type was adopted by both Spaniards and Indians, changing little from the time of the first colony until twenty years after American occupation.
The body of the plow consisted of a short tree trunk with a large limb left attached to serve as a handle, cottonwood being preferred for its toughness. The farmer sharpened the lower end of the trunk and bolted a piece of iron on it as a point. Just in front of the handle a hole was cut in the body of the plow, and equipped with a strong peg on which was hinged the long straight tongue or beam of the plow. The pitch was adjusted by a short upright post set in the body and running through a hole in the beam. By placing pegs in this post, the farmer changed the angle between the beam and the plow body for deep or shallow furrows.
Some forty years ago, I observed a similar plow, drawn by oxen, being used by the Southern Tepehuan, an Indian group living today in southern Durángo and northern Jalisco. In regard to ploughs, as with other items of material culture, there was a serious lack of iron in New Mexico. The viceroyalty had a monopoly on iron imported into New Mexico, and as the 1639 report of the Santa Fe cabildo indicates, there was a shortage of iron not only for ploughing but also for horseshoes. According to the cabildo report, no iron had been shipped into New Mexico (at least for the colonists' use) for eleven years.
Although the wagons moving along the Camino Real were four-wheeled, the locally used
carreta
was a two-wheeled, oxen-drawn cart whose wheels were made of sections of cottonwoods with holes pierced in the center to attach to a crude axle. Probably not every homestead had its own cart, for in rough country its use was rather restricted.
Houses of the governors and other "urban" elite in New Mexico were considerably better furnished than those of the ordinary settler. Some furniture was transported over the Camino Real. It was, however, very expensive; for example, a used writing desk might be worth forty to eighty pesos. Bed, bedspreads, pillows, and bolsters were brought over the trail as early as the time of Oñate, as were camp beds, chairs, and tables. Other luxury goods utilized by the wealthier colonists included silver cutlery, salt shakers, pitchers and pots, and several kinds of the

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