 Then we'll turn to our speaker for today, who's Alexander McLeary, and she's going to talk about Ayer, memorabilia, archaeological evidence of land use patterns at the Pueblo de Abacue. Thank you, Rosemary. So I should just say that I teach right after at one o'clock. So this is going to be a very, very short, very short round bag, but there's a lot to get through. So I'm just going to go ahead and start. But I will be talking slightly more fast than I should. But anyways, so the Hinesito Pueblo de Abacue was established as a land grant to approximately 20 Hinesito Indian families by the Spanish crown in 1754 in the northern frontier of the Spanish Empire. The term Hinesito describes Native American youths and their descendants who were captured and sold into indentured servitudes in hispanic homes. Abacue, along with other Hinesito land grants such as Valen and San Miguel de Vado, represented a unique experiment in Spanish colonial policy. It was a compromise between racially motivated ideologies that ordinarily prohibited persons of non-Spanish descent from a land ownership and the Spaniard's desire to maintain their precarious existence in the northernmost frontiers of their empire. Hinesito Indians embodied this compromise as indigenous, baptized indigenous persons living in Spanish communities. The arrangement was favorable to the Spanish colonial government, as I mentioned, as Hinesito land grants were purposely placed in buffer areas between Spanish allied Pueblo settlements and hostile nomadic tribes. Despite the constant threat of raids, land grants of this nature were also, to a certain extent, desirable to Hinesito families as it granted them vicino or land-owning status. Tactical performances of Hispanic culture by Hinesito individuals were deployed for the purposes of defending their legal claims to environmental resources for maintaining Hinesito status over time. Furthermore, the development of pre-existing ties to other indigenous communities allowed for the development of trade relationships with otherwise hostile indigenous groups through networks of kinship and trade. Anglo-American incursions from the mid-19th century onwards brought yet another level of economic and political entanglements. The annexation of New Mexico by the U.S. in 1846 represented a considerable shift in the racial politics of the region. In contrast to the Spanish colonial racial ideology of the Sistema de Casta, the ideological tendency of Anglo-Americans tended to confound race and culture. This reality, together with the desire to possess as much land as possible, provided the U.S. with the motivation to circumvent the Treaty of Guadalupe and nullify communal land holdings previously recognized by the Spanish and Mexican governments in New Mexico, including those of Abacue. The Americans justified their policy with the assertion that Hinesito Indians were, quote, half-breed Indians. They assigned this term because the Hinesito Indians adopted several elements of Spanish culture, including language and religion, and were therefore not eligible for the same legal protections afforded to their neighboring Pueblo Indians. The term Hinesito has also carried negative misogynistic connotations in the Spanish and Mexican world, and thus was not a term by which persons of Indo-Hispanic descent might have self-identified. Despite these complications, Abacue has been unique in its ability to remain a corporate entity while retaining most of its communal lands. The community is currently undergoing a period of cultural revitalization, and many current and former Hinesito communities look to Abacue as they continue to strategize for the preservation of their land grants and communal culture. So this dissertation is part of a community mandated project to increase our knowledge of the history of the Hinesos of Abacue and to contribute to the efforts to renew local interest in Hinesito heritage. So community involvement in this project has occurred at every stage of the process, including but not limited to the development of research questions, methodologies, and locating excavation sites. So one of the ways that we do this is by making ourselves, well first of all, my project goes under the umbrella of the Berkeley Abacue Collaborative Archeology Project, which other archaeologists at Berkeley are involved in, including notably Professor Jensen Theron. And so one of the ways that we really tried to make this truly a collaborative process was to make ourselves very visible to the community, and at the various stages of the process. This is a copy, I know you can't read it, of little postcards that I distributed in advance of beginning excavations with Q&As, my contact information, my mug shots, so it would be readily identifiable. Some questions, also a stipulation that this was a community-based project, and any member of the Abacue community had the authority to stop us from working if they considered our presence problematic. We had really daily interactions with members of the community at our sites. We reported to the community onsite as the field school progressed, the excavations progressed, so you can see a flyer that was distributed onsite. And another thing was, and one of the concerns of the community elders was to ensure that Abacue youth were being involved in the project, and thanks to a funding secured by Pride June, we were able to pay young Abacue students for their labor as they learned basic excavation skills. So this was a big selling point. And another thing that we agreed to do as part of a Abacue project was to conduct ground penetrating radar on the sites before excavating. This was mostly to ensure that we would not accidentally uncover human remains. It also, of course, helps us target particular areas for excavations. But running GPR well in advance of excavation proved to be a kind of blessing because it allowed us to have time to make our presence known in the Pueblo that folks could recognize our faces and ask us questions and to encourage dialogue and identify any potential sources of conflict in advance of actual excavation. And this turned out to have happened. There was a bit of a snafu during our GPR trips, one of the GPR trips. I had originally planned to excavate in a particular location of the plaza very close to where the 2014 excavation occurred. So right here was my original area that had been approved by the board of Abacue, the community board. As it turned out, the small area of the plaza had three separate owners and its own share of concerned neighbors. So right before we were to begin our GPR work, literally the day we came on site, one of the property owners backed out, which was unknown to us, and one of our community partners actually informed me when I got on site. But immediately multiple families came forward and came forward and offered their properties for the purpose of excavation, which was very, very heartening. On that same trip, as we started working on the last site, the largest one, Abacue 3, that you see in blue, doesn't look the largest on that map, which is an area that's very visible from the plaza. One person actually purchased that distance and made it very clear that they did not want us on site and sort of yell at us from a distance to leave. And I try to explain what I was doing, introduce myself, but it was dialogue wasn't there. So the story gets a bit more complicated, but long story short, we did stop working. We pulled out the grid that we had just finished preparing and sort of prepared to pack up and go home. But as I was doing that, I immediately started texting some of my friends in the Pueblo to tell them what was going on. And they were able to be cleared quite quickly of the situation. It was really just a misunderstanding. And as soon as somebody said, don't shoot, this is Alexander, you know, Junstein, Abacue, I was like, oh, oh, yeah, yeah. And then, you know, we, yeah, it was always well. But it was during that sort of little exciting interlude that I got that inspired the title of this talk or part of the title for this talk, Ayed Memorias. One of the property owners was consoling me during this time, you know, as we were waiting to work things out. It's like, you know, so calm down, you know, it's like, oh, because, you know, it's freaking out a little bit. And he said, yeah, I'll teach you, I'll teach you a saying in Spanish. You can practice it. And he wrote it down. And it said, Ayed Memorias, mañana sueños o la chingada, which I will not translate. Okay. So I was already explaining the situation. So it really resonated with me, not just because it sort of humorously expressed my current sentiment, but it also had a temporal dimension to it, you know, and evoked memories of Abacue in years past, the challenges it faced and continues to face, and also its hope for the future. And so as I move on to, you know, the clear segue to thinking about what was Abacue like in the past? What were the experiences of its inhabitants who come from diverse ethnic backgrounds, yet share in a common history of colonial trauma as a result of slave trade and precarious social economic positioning on the lower rungs of Spanish colonial racial hierarchies? How is Abacue constituted? How might we understand the lived experiences of its residents? What social relationships are expressed through the consumption of foods and goods? How do these differ based on their occurrence in larger communal gatherings or fiestas during which the community might come together in celebration of a common history and identity as Abacue seños versus a more private and familial setting? How do they organize themselves and project the image of a casino or landowner status? How do they organize themselves from the very real threat to the security of their families and livestock? The excavations of 2016 gives us the means through which we can begin to answer these questions. So the rest of my talk will be just introducing you to some of the sites that we excavated in 2016. So this is, yeah, a map, a general map of Abacue. You can see the Plaza area. I don't have a laser pointer, I apologize, on the top right area of the corner. And you can see just at the southern end of the Sitia, part of the land grant, you can see the location of Abacue 1. Here's a bit of a close-up. So it's located just at our server area is located just at the base of this southern boundary wall that encompassed Abacue. And there were and is now actually located within an orchard, which is and also was a little area for some livestock and was gated off. And so that's why the server area was so small because we couldn't really get around everything else that was there. But there was an oral history, oral historical tradition that suggested that there was a Torion or a watchtower in this location. So we thought it would be interesting to explore that possibility. It's certainly located in the right place, like right southern boundary wall exposed to an area through which raiding parties might come through. And you know the GPR informed where we were working. We didn't find, unsurprisingly, the foundations of the Torion we found potentially wall-like feature located there. So it's kind of interesting. It's just a close-up of that. And we did find a couple, there weren't many artifacts, but we found a couple that were like communions interesting. We can start to construct a narrative around lack of artifacts and presence of lithic arrows. This is a Torion that's located away from Abacue but close to it. So these would have been very large structures. Okay, moving on to Abacue 2. So this Abacue 2 is a location of a small casita, a small house that had the reputation of being one of the older buildings in the pueblo. It was built using the Hacal structure which is wooden beams set close together and then covered in clay. It's a much quicker way to build a structure than using the Adobe brick. So they usually put up first. We had a couple good historical photos to help guide our excavations as well, the location of our units. So this is actually a picture to the right of what the structure looked like in the early 20th century. And here's just a map rendering of the site. And so that's that portion, right? That's still extant. This portion is actually that portion that part of the room block is no longer standing. And right in between somebody had built around the 30s and 40s that we can see in some other historical photographs, we can see somebody added an additional room constructed out of Adobe brick. So we decided to try to find the Hacal structure, which we were able to. Actually, this map is incomplete. The Hacal did go through C2 and C3 as well. You can see a close up here featuring Danny Sosa. And what was interesting about this site is that we were trying to understand how this area was formed. I was looking for artifact concentrations around the casita that would suggest refuse, discard, but we didn't find any lack of artifacts other than what we'd find right at the surface. What we found instead was a prepared surface around the front of the house. Larger rough cobbles were placed on top of a sand and then packed down with clay and that surrounded the outside portion of the casita. And you can, anyway, I don't know why I put that in there. Oh, so anyway, I'm not going to go through that. I'm short on time. We also did some thunder chronology at the request of the landowner who was interested to know exactly when this house dated. Unfortunately, we couldn't get dates for most of the samples that we were able to take. The ones that we did get dated to 19 were cut in 1915, but notice that they're all a type of pine tree, whereas the other ones are juniper. So it would suggest that these were newer replacements that were that were brought in. So it doesn't, I don't think it indicates that all of this house was constructed around 1915. So anyway, moving on to the last site that we excavated. Every Q3. Another close-up. So this last area is quite close to the plaza, but not directly on it. It's actually a race a little bit in elevation from it. The survey area is located on the clearing behind currently uninhabited structure known as Lala's House. You can see from the historical photo, both the house and the clearing, which appears to contain some trees. So that's the house and those are the trees. Let's see. So in the photo, you can see other houses along the same area, the same row as Lala's House, but those aren't continuous of Lala's House and they are not standing today. We did a GPR survey of the area. The GPR suggests a direct linear pattern on the southwest corner of the survey area, which might suggest, well might have suggested a structure no longer visible to the surface, which was kind of exciting. So we decided to explore those. I won't talk about test trench one, but I guess I will. We decided to excavate a very skinny, it's skinnier than it looks like on this map. After a conversation with one of the neighbors when they said they remembered a privy located to the northeast, not the northwest of the area, and I decided to assuage my panicky fear so that I'd somehow gotten my GPR map back to front. They're digging in the wrong place. So we decided to do some ground truthing and sure enough we found it immediately. So we know that the map is in fact located where it should be. Nevertheless, unfortunately, we were not able to find a structure. I don't know if you can see it from the back. It's a little hazy, but this kind of pattern here. So not the structure. It's quite clear that the area had been used as a trash deposit for quite some time. So those rectiline near patterns you're seeing here are mostly artifact concentrations. So the bad news is that we were getting bed razor bottles at 40 centimeters below surface. The good news is that we were also getting a high concentration of artifact that suggests earlier deposits as well in different locations at the site. Okay, so how am I doing? Okay, so very preliminary artifact analysis. Very, very preliminary. We did of course find more artifact categories than these four at the site. This is just what I was able to enter into our database for now. But it already kind of shows you some differential patterning at these sites. So you can see that Atticu-3 has much higher concentration of artifacts than the other two sites in general. There's a lot more fauna, which is not apparent from this graph, but there are also, oh sorry, there's supposed to be a end of sentence there. So there's a lot more fauna. What's not apparent from this graph is that there are a lot more botanical remains there, a lot of what appear to be cherry pits to me. It'd be interesting to see if we could figure out what species of pits we're seeing. It'd be also interesting to see if we can explore developing a horticultural heritage project at Abacue and seeing if we can replant some of these trees. There are a lot of historical maps of Abacue with that show orchards around, so it'd be kind of cool to explore that. You can see that Abacue-2 here has fewer artifacts than Abacue-3. Much more glass and proportionately more metal. These for the most part were found very close to the surface. I know that's not reflected in this graph, but you'll just have to take my word for it. So this suggests that only after the house became inhabited, the casita became uninhabited, that it basically started to accumulate litter, but much fewer artifacts there. Comparing Abacue-2 and 3 shows us that how folks at Abacue tended to dispose of their trash, they tended to do it behind their homes, away from view. This is certainly not true of all historical sites at New Mexico. From those, I remember now why I put that other historical photo, you can see a lot of historical photos that the puzzle looks very clean. There doesn't look like there are a lot of heaps of trash around, and I actually had some conversations with some community members about how privies tended to be quite far away from the houses themselves. So there was this kind of interest in cleanliness and hygiene and appearances, and certainly not true of all sites in New Mexico. And I think an argument might be made regarding the performativity of Visino status that pushes against racial stereotypes of any sort of behavior. So Abacue-1 has considerably less artifacts, most of which are ceramics, most of which, again, you'll have to take my word from it, are biscuit A from the pre-European contact Pueblo, which occupied the same general area. I find it interesting that we don't find nearly as much colonial-era ceramics in Abacue-1, which suggests that if this was the site of the Torion, and I do believe it's the general location from it, I'm not going to get into why, the adobe bricks that would have been constructed for the Torion would have dated close to the foundation of the Pueblo in 1754, before colonial ceramics would have been incorporated into the adobe matrix the way that you see it elsewhere in Abacue. And boy do you see it. Okay, so there's a lot more to be said about the fauna, of course. I'm very interested in the fact that we're seeing mostly caprines in our faunal assemblages across these sites, which again gives us a clue that a significant portion of our assemblage does in fact come from prior to the 20th century. So we're able to get a diachronic perspective on these sites. So also a note to compare these sites to the 2014 excavations, the ceramics that we're finding tend to be various kinds of planewares, which we're seeing to completely less of the fancier polychrome ceramics that were brought in from other Pueblos, as we saw in the 2014 excavation right along the plaza. So we're seeing discrete activity patterning throughout our sites, which is very nice. And that concludes my brown bag. Nice to know you're open to some questions. Yes, I have nine minutes for questions. So you're talking about there's an earlier pre-colonial occupation. So how tough is it to actually discriminate pre-colonial from the colonial? Is it that market or is there actually a lot of materials that would actually be transitioned between the two? And how really is that pre-colonial? Is it right before Abacue or is it much, much earlier? It's a few hundred years earlier. There is this narrative that Abacue was built on an older Pueblo site. And we definitely, Abacue is the type site for a particular kind of ceramic biscuit. And you see it everywhere. You really do everywhere in Abacue. I was worried when I saw that rectilinear pattern in the GPR at Abacue III. I was worried that this might be potentially associated with that earlier Pueblo, because the fact that we saw that patterning so relatively deep beneath the surface. I was thinking that maybe that that would be the case, but it wasn't. So the funny thing is, is that we have not been able to locate any features, as far as I know, around the Plaza. Maybe June would disagree, no? Yes, yeah, yeah. Other places around Abacue, certainly. But not actually where the Pueblo is located itself. It could be that it's just a different location. A lot of the community members say that they find the most artifacts around where an old elementary school used to be, which is currently not really occupied. So it could be that we're just digging, that the current Pueblo de Abacue is located in the area spatially distinct from the older Pueblo. But we definitely see artifacts, particularly ceramics from that era. But the fact that we are seeing so many so many livestock, so much livestock that were brought in by the Spaniards is another fact that convinces me that we're not just uncovering the Pueblo. Yeah, thank you. I mentioned having rotation to artisans died when I changed it into the fauna itself so far, or rotation patterns. And specifically, do you see any force? You know, I'm not there yet. I'm really, I've been focused mostly on just processing all the artifacts so cleaning them, cataloging them, entering in our database, making them available to other research partners that are interested in different assemblages. So I've not been able to get to that analysis. It's just instinct at this point and what I've been able to sort of see on a superficial level. I am really actually kind of excited at the morphological differences I'm seeing in the sheep and goats and cattle that we're excavating from Abacue and comparing those with our comparative collections at the, in the, at the Xarchaeology lab that are coming from California. So I think that it would be really cool to try to locate or identify breeds and seeing change in breeds. I definitely think that you could do that with cow. We're not finding a lot of, of boss, but when Anglo-Americans came into the area, they brought with them cattle from Texas that is very distinct from the, the heritage breeds that were brought in by the Spanish tend to be much smaller and all that kind of stuff. So there's, there's a lot of potential for a very, very cool research to be done at looking at diachronic change of livestock and husband-due practices and butchery practices. It's just going to have to wait till my next brown bag. What's that? Oh yeah. What did, what do you, you want to share? Okay. Yes. No, I know you're just having an analysis of that. So I'm not asking questions about the behavior that I'm asking more about what we're seeing today on the landscape. Would you say that the crops, that the people who live in this community, the descendants of the earlier arrivals have a distinctly different combination of tax of the thick road than, say, their neighbors who either came in earlier or came in later? I would not be able to answer that question at all. I, I've not seen any crops being farmed around the immediate area of Abacue and both of June's eyebrows are raised. So I'm sure you'd be able to answer that question differently. There's a significant amount of farming. There's a lot of range management for the, the pastures for the cattle. But yeah, they maintain their own heirloom bridles, chili pepper, but the very proud of, but there's also, there's ancestral graved gardens for pre-contact cattle going cotton, corn beans and squash, all that stuff. I mean, they've actually been working with plantain to bring some of those crops back in small experimental grid plots. So there's both the pre-contact stuff, they're glad I was working on them with, but then there's more of the heirloom, corn beans and squash, everything else, the anasazi beans, but there's also what they call Abacue chili. And that's an important part. So they are growing essentially Native American species, they're not focusing on the weeds in the barleys that you might associate with Spanish harassment or oppression. Although the monks at the monastery who are doing the beer down the road are very interested in asking about what varieties of Spanish colonial barleys and things might be brought back. So that is actually a conversation they're having, but yeah, it's definitely not my specialty about what they're doing with their food. There's all those food security initiatives that they're a part of to try to make sure that the youth in the community's traditional techniques are still being brought back in time and really thought through on this part of their learning process. Speaking of talk, I've got one minute. Or two minutes, okay. Yes, Chris? Very briefly, we've gotten a little preview of more of our time analysis, but what are the next steps? The next steps for me is to get through that fauna. That's my priority. There are other graduate students and other researchers working on other assemblages at the same time as I am. So we have Danny Sosa Aguilar, who is looking at the lithic assemblage. Oh, he's right there, he's right there. Yay, look at him. Okay. June is looking at the ceramics with Heather Atherton. Yep, and I guess now it's kind of the buckling downstage. Oh, Kirsten. People are pointing at Annie. Right, sorry. Of course, Annie is beginning her project this summer at Abicu as well. And she is focusing on the water management practices in New Mexico as well. So the Baca project is growing. So it's nice to see you. Thank you. Thank you very much.