Uncovering America's First War
Uncovering America's First War
Contact, Conflict, and Coronado's Expedition to the Rio Grande
By the 1530s, Indigenous Pueblo populations in the American Southwest reached tens of thousands of people with a rich culture expressed through stunning architecture, ceramic technology, and ceremonial life. Then, into that world came outsiders—an army of foreigners from the south led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. Coronado’s expedition was sent from Spain’s new colony in Mexico, seeking overland routes to Asia. Not finding what they sought, the strangers made steep demands on the Pueblo people, and the Pueblos fought back. First contacts at the western Pueblos of Zuni, Hopi, and Acoma led to open warfare.
Coronado continued eastward into an area settled by ancestors of today’s Rio Grande Pueblos, where thousands lived in large villages along the river. The Spanish called the area “Tiguex,” which became the overwintering place for Coronado by the end of 1540. Increasing tensions and resistance that winter spilled over into violence in America’s earliest named war: the Tiguex War. The largest and most intact battle site of that fierce conflict is known as Piedras Marcadas Pueblo, situated within present-day Albuquerque, New Mexico. Coronado’s men were armed with crossbows and muskets while their Mexican Indigenous allies relied on stone arrows and slingstones. The Puebloans mounted a courageous defense of their largest village, piling rocks on the rooftops and hurling them down on the attackers. Today, hundreds of artifacts found at Piedras Marcadas reveal the colliding cultures who fought each other within those ancient walls and plazas that are now silent but were once the focal point of a life-and-death contest for survival.
A masterpiece of archaeological research.…Uncovering America’s First Waris the definitive study of one of the most important places in the US Southwest: the ancestral Tiwa village of Piedras Marcadas Pueblo. Chronicling Schmader’s decades of exhaustive research, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in New Mexican history, the Coronado expedition, and Pueblo negotiations of early colonialism.’—Matthew Liebmann, author of Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico
Schmader’s work represents a quantum advance in understanding of the Coronado expedition and the Native peoples it impacted.’—Richard Flint and Shirley Flint, authors of The Coronado Expedition: From the Distance of 460 Years
Schmader’s command of archaeological, ethnohistorical, geographical, and oral history literature takes what once was the ephemeral evidence of Coronado’s entrada and makes it into a clearly marked trail in the heart of the American Southwest. With the approach of the quincentennial observations of this event, it will be Schmader’s work that will illuminate the worlds of Coronado and his army and that of the Puebloan Peoples he encountered.’—Russell K. Skowronek, coeditor of The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846–1876
Matthew F. Schmader has been conducting archaeological research in central New Mexico for more than forty years. He has conducted research on sites of every major cultural time period in New Mexico and served as the Albuquerque City Archaeologist for ten years. He is currently an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Foreword
Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint
Preface
Introduction. Overview of Research
Chapter 1. Worlds of Change
Chapter 2. To La Tierra Nueva
Chapter 3. Weaponry
Chapter 4. The Middle Rio Grande
Chapter 5. Arrival at Tiguex
Chapter 6. The Southern Tiwa World
Chapter 7. Piedras Marcadas Pueblo
Chapter 8. Artifacts: Categories and Descriptions
Chapter 9. Materials Analyses
Chapter 10. Results and Interpretations
Chapter 11. Aftermath in the Pueblo World
Afterword
Theodore Jojola
Acknowledgments
Glossary
References
Index
