ANT 351 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Álvar Núñez Cabeza De Vaca, Smallpox, Juan Ponce De León
The Transition to History
- In many areas, the prehistoric sequence ends sometime around AD 1450 with the
collapse of complex, highly organized cultural systems and the abandonment of areas
that were formerly densely inhabited
oEx: the Hohokam and Salado of the Sonoran desert, the Mogollon of the Arizona
and New Mexico Mountains, the Sinagua of central Arizona, and the cultural
system centered on Casas Grandes
-For other areas there is no prehistoric cultural collapse and no widespread, late
prehistoric abandonment
owhen the first Spanish explorers arrive Native Americans are living in the same
settlements that they founded in the final years of the prehistoric period
EX: the Hopi, the Zuni, and many of the pueblo communities along
the Rio Grande River
-the distinction between “prehistory” and “history” is false, to many people
-To many Native Americans there is no “mystery” of the “Anasazi” to be solved,
because ancient people and modern people are not separated by an arbitrary
distinction between prehistory and history
-The term “history” is also considered problematic by many people because it implies
that only written accounts by Europeans constitute a genuine or reliable chronicle of
events
othere are many oral traditions, stories, and legends that refer quite specifically to
people and events of the past and constitute a legitimate form of history in their
own right
-the distinction between “prehistory” and “history” primarily because of the profound
and sometimes devastating changes that took place in Native American culture in the
Southwest after the initial contact with European explorers
-hings would never be the same after the coming of the Europeans in so many areas of
life, including economy, social organization, settlement patterns, and religion
-Most scholars accept the terms “prehistoric” and “prehistory” as referring to the time
before European explorers, colonists, military figures, and clergy in the Southwest began
to write accounts of what they witnessed, recorded, and interpreted
-“protohistory” and “protohistoric,” to refer to the period of time after European contact
in places where written reports are incomplete or missing
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
-there is a very poorly known time period in the earliest days of European contact, when
the influences of Europeans were often felt even in areas where no European people
were present
-please note that the written history that does exist is extremely biased toward particular
sorts of information and particular viewpoints
-military officers or priests who had very definite types of information that they were
charged with recording
-strong points of view regarding the morality and customs of the people they were
observing and often did not have the linguistic skills necessary to adequately
comprehend what they were observing
-Written accounts were often written to impress superiors and are filled with
exaggeration or concealment of failures
- historical record is also woefully small, with extensive geographic areas and long time
periods having no surviving documentation
The Late Prehistoric Picture
-In the closing days of prehistory (in the early AD 1500s), broad areas of the Southwest
that formerly had been densely occupied were abandoned and virtually devoid of
people
-There had been severe climatic disruptions across the northern Southwest from about
AD 1250 to 1450
-during this period that there was widespread abandonment of very large regions in the
Four-Corners area of the Colorado Plateau and the mountainous regions of eastern
Arizona and western New Mexico
- Ancestral Puebloans retreated to a few environmentally favored places like the Rio
Grande, Acoma, Zuni, and the Hopi Mesas. The Mogollon cultural pattern was lost as
Mogollon people abandoned their mountainous homeland and moved north to join the
pueblos or south to join rancheria communities into northern Mexico
-By AD 1450 the Hohokam cultural system had collapsed and what remained of
Hohokam culture was represented by small villages of Pima people living along the Gila
River and the Tohono O’odham living in the deserts of southwestern Arizona
-peoples speaking Yuman languages lived along the lower Colorado River
-Upland Yumans practiced a hunting and gathering lifeway across much of northwestern
Arizona. Athabaskan-speaking peoples, ancestors of modern Navajo and Apache people,
practiced hunting and gathering and some agriculture in the northern and western
portions of the greater pueblo area
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
