The Documentary Relations of the Southwest

Abstract

The Documentary Relations of the Southwest (DRSW) is a multiphase project of the Arizona State Museum which has as its main objective the bilingual publication of documents basic to the history, ethnohistory, and cultural anthropology of the greater Southwest. The initial phase of the project involves archival research and documentary selection and has been funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. All documents reviewed are recorded in a computerized master index. As defined by the DRSW, the Southwest includes the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and parts of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas in the United States; in Mexico, it encompasses the states of the two Californias, Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Nuevo Le6n, and parts of Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi, Nayarit, and Tamaulipas. The central focus of the DRSW is to record native and Spanish contact throughout the colonial period. It is possible to study contact and assimilation in the post-independence period with the same methodology and information management, but modular design and budget constraints place certain chronological and geographical limitations upon this investigation. At the close of the second year of the grant, the DRSW master index included some 5,000 documents carefully selected from a two-year review of over 100,000 documents. Each serial entry on the master index includes categories for names, places, dates, bibliographic data, languages, ethnic groups, information categories, key terms, a precis, and miscellaneous notes. All of these serial entries have been subsequently arranged in indexes for general use, but the entire file can be rearranged according to many other general and specific designs. The master index is being prepared by research assistants who have re-