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Order on the Edge of Empire: Social Network Analysis of Colonial Mission Landscapes in Nuevo México and the Pimería Alta

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Abstract

Archaeologists working from a postcolonial framework are increasingly examining how the politics of Indigenous societies in North America structured European colonialism on the continent. Understanding the cultural landscapes of Indigenous societies is one part of this process, and the logics of colonial attempts to organize and control this space is a necessary counterpoint in the dialectic of colonial encounters. Social network analysis (SNA) can be applied to both Indigenous and colonial social organizations to understand how network organization influenced colonial encounters. As a case study, we compare the imagined colonial organization of early seventeenth-century Spanish missionization among the Pueblos of New Mexico with eighteenth-century missionization in the Pimería Alta of Arizona and Sonora. Network analysis is applied to documentary evidence to evaluate the idealized structure of Spanish mission systems in both regions as missionaries imagined it. The network qualities of missionary orders proved extremely resilient. Basic network qualities remained, enduring revolts and bureaucratic changeover. The results highlight how a simple and replicable structure was an adaptation to the unpredictable colonial borderlands. These case studies offer a template for the study of cultural landscapes through SNA and modeling the hidden mechanisms of colonialism.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the participants at the Southwest Seminar on Colonial Latin American History for helping us strengthen our argument early in the writing process. We wish to acknowledge the Office of Ethnohistoric Research at the Arizona State Museum for aiding our search for primary documents. We are grateful to Kathryn MacFarland and Jonathan Hall for the creation of the maps used in this article.

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The authors have no funding sources to disclose which supported this research.

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  1. San Diego State University, San Diego, California, USA

    Nicole M. Mathwich

  2. University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA

    Evan Giomi

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Mathwich, N.M., Giomi, E. Order on the Edge of Empire: Social Network Analysis of Colonial Mission Landscapes in Nuevo México and the Pimería Alta. Int J Histor Archaeol 26, 474–497 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-021-00611-w

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