Conquistadors Research Articles

Wallmapu-Araucanía in flames! An historical political ecology of fire in the domination of southern Chile

The conflict over Wallmapu-Araucanía in southern Chile, between the Spanish conquistadores, the Chilean state and the Mapuche peoples, dates from the 16th century, with a key moment being the forced integration of Mapuche land into the Chilean state in the late nineteenth century. This paper discusses this long period of conflict in three moments: conquest, occupation and liberation, and it focuses on the use of fire as a politico-symbolic and techno-productive tool. A ‘landscapes of power framework’ is used for this historical political ecology analysis, based on texts from the nineteenth century to the present. The conclusions point to the historical importance of the use of fire as a tool not only for physical changes in the landscape, but principally as a tool of political symbolism that relates to a history of conflict of terror and displacement, used by the forces of occupation and resistance.

Itinerant Diplomatic Precedent: A Spanish Colonial Encounter with Native Americans within an Islamic Context, al-Hajari’s Kitab 1611–13

Abstract This article explores the Morisco Qasim al-Hajari’s (Kitab) The Supporter of Religion against the Infidel 1611–13 for its diplomatic merit within the rubric of the Islamic Maghreb. In particular, it sheds light on how a scene from Spain’s colonial expansionist encounters with native Americans is utilized within an Arabophone context of the early modern Islamicate world. Al-Hajari Islamizes the momentous and violent imperial encounter between the Aztec king Moctezuma and the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés (1519) in Mexico. Additionally, he juxtaposes such a scene with Spain’s violation of the treaties with Muslim Andalusians (1492–1609) and its incursions upon its neighboring Protestant powers. Al-Hajari’s account not only indicates the itinerant condition which characterizes the circulation of ideas between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean but also demonstrates how imperial episodes acquire different meanings, through diplomatic endeavors and within different hermeneutic communities.

“From Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization”: (North) American Historians, Spanish Conquistadores, and the Fate of the Amerindians in the New World, 1840s–1960s

This article looks at the (North) American historiography on Spanish America with a particular focus on the fate of the Amerindians from the 1840s to the early 1960s. For over a century, (North) American historians routinely romanticized the Spanish conquest, while also routinely scorning the indigenous population (as well as mestizos and blacks), and embracing the rising pseudo-scientific Anglo-Saxon racism of the day. Down to the 1960s, (North) American historians by and large viewed Amerindians as savages and barbarians, while they interpreted the history of the Spanish conquistadores and their successors in ways that held Western civilization itself up as the main colonial heritage in the Americas (north and south).

The politics of indigeneity: decolonizing historical memory and education in Colombia

ABSTRACT This article explores how the Misak (Guambianos) from the Colombian southwest are revitalising their collective memory and militant politics in a nation that has historically prioritised its Spanish heritage. Through the analysis of twenty-month collaborative research conducted by three Misak University (MU) students and the article’s author (a non-Indigenous Colombian affiliated with a university from the Global North), the article claims that political engagement results from this community’s autonomous educational institutions and pedagogical practices. The MU is one of these Misak autonomous efforts engaging with non-traditional pedagogies, such as caminar el territorio, to promote a ‘militant indigenous identity’ committed to their cultural differentiation. These educational practices evolved from other methods for memory reproduction embraced by the Misak since colonial times. As the tearing down of the statues of Spanish conquistadores in 2020 shows, the Misak’s educational efforts have cultivated a new indigenous generation that seeks to make a political and cultural impact beyond their territory.

Masters of the Land: Native Ship and Canal Building During the Spanish-Aztec War

AbstractIn 1520, during the midst of the conquest of Mexico, Spanish conquistadors and their Native allies embarked on a massive naval project—the construction of 13 brigantines and a canal—needed to help conquer the aquatic city of Tenochtitlan. In the dominant historical literature on the war, the Spanish tend to receive most, if not all, of the credit for the success of the nautical program. The contributions of their Native allies by contrast are little-known and oft-overlooked in the historiography. Drawing on Spanish and Indigenous sources, this article highlights the vital roles that Native peoples played in the naval episode, whether it be felling timbers, carving wood, transporting logs, or excavating the canal. In addition to labor services, it also considers the importance of Indigenous ecological and hydrological expertise, and demonstrates how such knowledge played a pivotal role in the overall success of the enterprise. I argue, ultimately, that these contributions made the Native peoples, and not the Spanish, the true masters of the amphibious operation. Along the way, this essay seeks to contribute to several important strands of scholarship, chiefly the New Conquest History, environmental histories of New Spain, and the burgeoning literature on Indigenous knowledge production in Spanish America.

The Roots of Spanish Racialized Thinking in Colonial America, 1400–1600

This paper explores the double standard evident in the attitudes of sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadores towards Native American culture. The study investigates why the conquistadores condemned Native rituals as barbarous while perpetrating their own brutal acts against the Natives. It is argued that this inconsistency stemmed from a racialized worldview rooted in ethnocentrism, shaped by the historical influence of Islam on the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish culture including Catholicism, and their encounters with Native Americans. This racialized thinking, although distinct from modern biological racism, justified Spanish imperialism as a holy mission. By examining relevant sources, the paper reveals the complex factors that contributed to this discriminatory mindset and highlights its significance in understanding the success of the Spanish conquest of Indigenous peoples.

Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 by Brooke M. Bauer

Reviewed by: Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 by Brooke M. Bauer Alejandra Dubcovsky Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840. By Brooke M. Bauer. Indians and Southern History. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023. 263 pages. Cloth, ebook. The second endnote of Becoming Catawba cites "personal knowledge gained from my grandmother" (173). With this, Brooke M. Bauer announces a different kind of historical project, one that relies on as well as privileges Native archives, perspectives, and knowledges. Blending ethnographic, linguistic, archaeological, personal, and historical sources, the book chronicles three hundred years of Catawba history, arguing for the centrality of Catawba women in the making and remaking of the Catawba Nation. Detailing "Indigenous/American pasts, presents, and futures," Becoming Catawba seems a fitting embodiment of the type of scholarship Philip J. Deloria called for in his recent presidential address for the Organization of American Historians.1 The book moves chronologically, with chapters that overlap temporally to create a layered history of Catawba people in the Carolina Piedmont. Centering Native women and their experiences and struggles, Bauer reframes a familiar narrative about the political coalescence and eventual decline of the Catawba Nation as a story about persistence and identity making that was as malleable as it was enduring. Becoming Catawba is thus as much a story of change as it is one of "startling continuities" (1) of Catawba culture, traditions, and language. Cognizant that she is describing broad changes and patterns, Bauer anchors her study in the life of Sally New River, a Catawba woman who lived from approximately 1746 to 1821 and had a long career as a steward and protector of Catawba lands. By opening almost each chapter with Sally New River, Bauer helps provide a face, a name, and intimate details to a sweeping history of Catawba people. New River's experiences ranged from losing a parent to the smallpox epidemics, working away from her people within an English household, learning to read, returning to Catawba territory and marrying an important leader, gaining her town's trust, and eventually securing a land deed that helped protect Catawba lands from encroachment. Through New River, Bauer shows that the everyday activities of women, from planting fields to collecting water, were part of broader social, political, and even spiritual contexts. New River, along with her life and stories, serves as a touchstone for Catawba life. [End Page 394] Becoming Catawba begins before the arrival of Spanish conquistadores, chronicaling the environmental and political world of the Piedmont Indians, ancestors of the people who would become known as the Catawbas. Bauer stresses the importance of water to the lives of Native women in the Piedmont, showing how waterways were critical to women's labor, health, and beliefs. And though never explicitly tying these long-standing beliefs to ongoing Native advocacy for water rights today, Bauer shows the deep history of this connection. But this early chapter offers more than a lesson on Catawba lifeways that would soon come under threat by European invasion; it is also a methodological guide for how to do early Native history. Bauer seamlessly blends well-known colonial sources—such as the 1585 Theodor de Bry engraving "Indians Dancing around a Circle of Posts" (37)—with archaeological evidence and oral sources, creating not only a much more textured early history of the people who would become Catawba but also one that elevates Native voices and sources by placing them on equal footing with materials that are more familiar to early Americanists. The core of the book aims to show the multifaceted ways Native women participated in the creation, consolidation, and endurance of the Catawba Nation. Chapter 2 explores an intense period of change from 1540 (with Hernando de Soto's entrada) to the 1750s (with the firm entrenchment of English colonies in the region). Carefully reading English colonial sources that downplay and often outright dismiss Native women, Bauer weaves a different story. She shows the important role of Native women, who "helped their families by integrating their traditional knowledge, subsistence patterns, and kinship networks with those of other Catawban-speaking people within the region" (55). Becoming Catawba argues that coalescence...

Economics of Raramuri Criollo and British crossbred cattle production in the Chihuahuan desert: Effects of foraging distribution and finishing strategy

Significant challenges for raising beef cattle exist in the arid and semi-arid regions of the United States. Limited forage availability and small profit margins are among the greatest concerns in Western U.S. ranching operations. One potential option for ranchers in these regions is using alternative cattle genetics, such as Raramuri Criollo (RC), a Mexican heritage biotype of cattle brought to the Americas by Spanish Conquistadors. Previous research has shown that compared to commercial beef breeds, RC cattle exhibit behavior traits that result in foraging patterns that could reduce the environmental footprint of rangeland animal agriculture. We investigated the profitability of raising this biotype in an alternative production system (grass finishing) in the Chihuahuan Desert by producing enterprise budgets for a herd of RC cattle on the Jornada Experimental Range. Results show that RC cattle have lower operating and overhead costs when compared to Angus x Hereford (AxH) crossbred cattle. This reduction in costs allowed the RC cattle operation to have greater net returns to land and risk when compared to an AxH cattle operation in the same location. Raising RC cattle could be a means of strengthening the economic sustainability of desert beef cattle ranching in the United States.

Amphibious storytellers in Leo Africanus and The Moor’s Account

This article discusses the traces of two Early Modern Arab figures dramatized in The Moor’s Account (2014) by Laila Lalami and Leo Africanus (1992) by Amin Maalouf. Marginality, nomadism, and humanism are dramatized in the lives of Mustafa Al-Zammouri/Estebanico a black Arab from Zammour taken as a slave and sold to a Spanish conquistador who joined the Narváez Expedition and Leo Africanus/Alhassan Alwazzan who was captured by Spanish pirates and sent as a gift to Pope Leo X (1475–1521) around the same time. The lives of those two Early Modern Arab travelers provide the flesh for a bicultural humanism that avoids jingoistic nationalism that is centered around ideas of the canon that excludes narratives and texts from “the other world.” Bicultural humanism, I argue, is a unique space where both Maalouf and Lalami exercise their talent of recovering the lives of the silenced other and in doing so, challenge Orientalist stereotypes by creating dynamic narratives of Arabs and Muslims as complex nomad characters not essentialized violent multitudes enraged at Western modernity.

A Reevaluation of the Role of War Captives in the Aztec Empire

Traditionally, historians believed that taking captives was a major goal in Mexica warfare, and this tendency has even been given as a reason why the Spanish conquistadors defeated the Mexica. Although historians have largely revised these conclusions, the perception that captives were important to Aztec strategy and warfare persists. In this article I argue that the need for captives was not great enough to affect Aztec military strategy or battlefield conduct. First, rituals only needed a small number of victims, which could easily be acquired through the normal course of battle, and thus did not constitute a specific objective. Second, Mexica strategy focused on economic objectives, rather than captive taking. Finally, individual warriors were not well equipped to take prisoners. Although captives played a vital role in Mexica society, the practice should be thought of as opportunistic, rather than strategic.

Poder compartido: Repúblicas urbanas, monarquía y conversación en Castilla del Oro, 1508–1573

No matter what interpretation we use of the Spanish conquest (caused by Indigenous demographic collapse, or caused by Indigenous participation/collaboration or civil wars), the alleged outcome makes no sense. It was simply impossible for a handful of Europeans to move across an entire continent to swiftly establish a global absolutist monarchy built on the enslaving of millions of Indigenous peoples for nearly 400 years. This is a fairy tale. Excess force and violence do not empires make: witness the 20-year US adventure in Afghanistan. Jorge Díaz Ceballos comes closer to offering a satisfying account of one of the structural foundations of the resilient, polycentric, multicultural empire that was the Spanish monarchy in the New World.For Díaz Ceballos, the city, as ideology and political practice, holds the key to understanding the many mysteries of early Spanish conquest and colonization. Cities were not buildings but social relations that justified authority and mobility and defined legitimacy and sovereignty. They were not Spanish either. They were relations that from the very beginning involved Indigenous elites first and later Indigenous commoners. So-called Spanish cities began as alliances (many matrimonial) between Spanish conquistadores and caciques via the patriarchal gifting of elite women.The original cities were always hybrid, denoting in their names the local supporting cacicazgo (including Darién, Acla, Natá, and Panamá, as Díaz Ceballos shows in exploring the origins and development of five cities in Castilla del Oro). Without this support, cities did not survive. Cities emerged usually as a result of conflict among rival parties (Spanish and Indigenous peoples) to secure territorial jurisdictions, moving boundaries of hinterlands against rivals.Indigenous commoners originally got involved as repartimiento/encomienda labor, thus reinforcing patterns of hinterland nonurban dispersion. Yet soon and paradoxically the discourse of conversion as urban “conversation” made it imperative to create reducciones. Indigenous commoners became the main consumers of urban institutions thereafter, which led to the transformation of one original unified hybrid city into two urban republics.Cities were republican political relations of individuals with each other, outsiders, and rulers. The city was the ideological tool kit of anyone (Spanish, cimarrón, or Indigenous) seeking to negotiate with nearby nonurban (unincorporated Indigenous peoples) or urban communities or with a distant crown. The ultimate sovereign was not the crown but the corporate electoral bond among hierarchies of peers who did not tolerate any autocratic top-down rulings. The category of tyranny was the bottom-up critique of any outside, nonconsensual imposition.Legitimacy came from the endless negotiation of the deeds that communities deemed as service to the crown and the privileges that a gracious king was expected to give out as rewards. For Díaz Ceballos, newly constituted cities systematically refused to acknowledge crown contracts with adelantados. The consensus of peers elected in cabildos could easily overturn crown rules. Independence juntas in 1810 did nothing different than the elected cabildo members of Veracruz had done when in 1519 they decided not to recognize the contract signed by the crown that gave Diego Velázquez control over the colonization of Mexico. Hernando Cortés was neither the first nor the last to mobilize both commoners and Indigenous elites for the creation of cities to gain legitimacy and sovereignty over rivals empowered by the crown. There was no Spanish monarchy without the bottom-up power of cities, and there were no cities without the power of the crown as the source of grace for both individuals and communities.It would be a grave mistake to confuse this book with yet another study of the role of cities in the early modern Spanish monarchy. This is not the Indies version of Helen Nader's Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale of Towns, 1516–1700 (1990). Díaz Ceballos uses his interpretation of cities as forms of relations and as occupying space in Castilla del Oro (today's Urabá and Panama) to elucidate the bottom-up nature of the Spanish empire in the New World. In the Indies, the ideological cities led to the bicultural empowerment of commoners, first Spanish and later Indigenous. At least in Panama, cities became controlled by commoner-merchants whose claims to privilege were no other than having first offered specific urban trades and services. As encomiendas encouraged Indigenous residential dispersal, conversion via the ideology of cities ultimately empowered Indigenous commoners as well. The república de indios was nothing but the expansion of the urban ideal to commoners, via the control of newly carved-out commons and cabildo elections. The new social contracts of the Indies allowed for extraordinary levels of social mobility, at least in the sixteenth century. Republicanism allowed for the rapid spread of the Spanish empire all over the Indies.

Across Time, Space, and Matter

Across Time, Space, and Matter

Alonso de la Vera Cruz’s Manuals and the University of Mexico in 16th Century: Teaching Theology and Arts from a Missionary Perspective

The creation of the University of Mexico (1553) favoured the intensification of the processes of translation of normative knowledge between Europe and America, which had already begun with the arrival of the first Spanish conquistadores and missionaries to the New World. This article offers a synthesis of the recent historiography on the University of colonial Mexico, to be profiled as a missionary Studium, clearly differentiated from the European models with which it has tended to be compared (in particular, Salamanca). Focusing on the printed works of the Augustinian friar Alonso de la Vera Cruz (1507-84), one of the first teachers at the University of Mexico, we find representative examples of the type of propaedeutic teaching of the Arts (Logic, Natural Philosophy) which was common in the particular academic context of 16th-century New Spain. On the other hand, the theological production of Vera Cruz illustrates well the strategies of flexibilization and localization that were put into practice in order to successfully translate the preexisting Christian normativity to unforeseen and challenging contexts.

Visualizing Juan de Oñate’s Colonial Legacies in New Mexico

ABSTRACT In 2005, the Cuarto Centenario memorial in Albuquerque, New Mexico was installed, comprised of La Jornada, a sculptural grouping honouring Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate’s 1598 settlement in New Mexico, and Numbe Whageh, an earthwork reflecting a Native response to Oñate’s colonial legacies. This essay considers the June 2020 removal of Oñate from the memorial’s sculptural grouping, after a protestor was shot in a standoff with a New Mexico citizen “militia.” I will also examine other visual representations of Oñate in the state, including an equestrian statue in Alcade that was also removed in June 2020, as well as the inclusion of “Oñate’s foot” in the 2018 SITE Santa Fe exhibition Casa Tomada. These representations, and their active histories, demonstrate how Oñate’s colonial violence continues to resonate in the present day.

Градостроительная политика Испании в Новом Свете на примере Мехико, колониального мегаполиса страны

This article analyzes the history of the Mexico City, the capital of the vice-kingdom of New Spain since its foundation until the end of the colonial period. The author focuses on the main principles of urban pol-icy in the colonies, city plans, development and transformation of the city throughout the colonial history. Conquering the local population and moving across the territory of Mexico, the Spanish conquistadors not only conquered existing settlements, but also founded their own fortresses and outposts, attaching exceptional importance to the con-struction of cities on the territory of colonial possessions. New Spanish cities in America were used by the conquistadors as strongholds for fur-ther colonization and economic development of subordinate territories. The appearance of Spanish cities, their fortifications, Catholic churches were supposed to inspire the Indians with reverence and fear of the con-querors. The urbanization of the New World proceeded as an important link in the process of conquest and development of new territories by the Spanish conquistadors. The future metropolis of New Spain, Mexi-co City, was located on the site of the main Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. The idea to found a city on the site of the Indian Tenochtitlan belonged to E. Cortes. The plan of the city of Mexico belonged to the famous Spanish architect Garcia Bravo. By the beginning of the XIX century. Mexico City grew, expanded, the city had 335 streets, 146 lanes, 12 blocks, 90 large and small squares. The rapid development of the city of Mexico City was interrupted by the events of the War of Independ-ence, the destruction of which had to be liquidated in the first quarter of the 19th century.

Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay by Shawn Michael Austin

Reviewed by: Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay by Shawn Michael Austin Barbara A. Ganson Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay. By Shawn Michael Austin. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2020. Pp. xvi, 382. $85.00. ISBN: 9780826361967.) Shawn Michael Austin in his exciting new book provides an insightful analysis into the everyday lives of the Guaraní through the study of colonial kinship in Paraguay. His focus is on those Native peoples who were subjected to labor demands and other obligations under the Spanish institution of the encomienda, as well as the African peoples and those of mixed descent who interacted with Spanish society, especially in Asuncion and its satellite communities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These Native peoples were generally under the control of Franciscan missionaries, although the author provides details on the Guaraní from the Jesuit missions to elucidate the divergent patterns of Native resistance and colonial practices. In contrast to previous works, Austin draws upon rich archival documents with emphasis on 350 judicial records, which have been underutilized, and often contain the testimonies of the Guaraní. The author uses a broad framework to demonstrate how ethnic soldiering first began with the Spanish expeditions into the Chaco region in search of precious metals in the sixteenth century, rather than with the arming of the Guaraní by the Jesuits to combat Indian slavery in the early seventeenth century. The Franciscans were also the first to evangelize among the Guaraní in Guairá in southeastern Brazil prior to the arrival of the first Jesuits in 1609 who became a major evangelical force in the region. Austin builds on the pioneering works (1954) of anthropologist Elman R. Service for his analysis on kinship to demonstrate how the Guaraní shaped Paraguayan colonial society. Spanish conquistadors relied on and exploited the kinship relations they established with the Guaraní before and well beyond the introduction of the encomienda and a tributary system in 1556. The author states that the Guaraní term mborayhu (loving) is a complex word that describes the Natives’ relationship with their encomenderos (grantees of Indian laborers), which implied reciprocal benefits and a sense of community. Austin further discusses how religious orders but especially the Jesuits were the major purchasers of African slaves in the Rio de la Plata who put their slaves to work on their ranches, farms, convents, and colleges. In 1682, he notes, Africans, whether enslaved or free, comprised [End Page 620] 15 percent of Asuncion’s population. Africans, the author convincingly argues, must be viewed within the context of indigenous society. The author mentions an absence of church records in Paraguay; however, a few original baptismal and marriage records from the colonial period, such as those of Mission Santa Rosa, remain in the archives of the churches themselves, rather than in Asuncion. Accordingly, one wonders about the extent to which grandparenthood ties took place between the Guaraní and African slaves, a pattern that was present in baptismal records in the church records of small towns in southeastern Brazil. The author’s analysis of African slavery in Paraguay is a major achievement, but perhaps he could have examined slavery in greater detail in other parts of the Rio de la Plata, such as Uruguay, to cast a broader framework to strengthen his analysis. Aside from these minor points, Austin’s work represents a major contribution to the history of the Guaraní and Spanish relations during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This informative book will be useful for scholars who study Spanish borderlands, ethnohistory, race mixture, and colonial Latin American history. Barbara A. Ganson Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Copyright © 2022 The Catholic University of America Press

Western Disorientations: The Vanishing East of South America and Eastern Europe

In this paper I utilise Edward Said’s framework of Orientalism in order to investigate how the regions that the European explorers have mistakenly or negligently identified in their imaginaries as “the East” are brought into the colonial order through an a priori assumption of their inferiority to the West. I turn to South America and Eastern Europe as the two frontiers which make these operations visible. Through the analysis of primary sources such as travel journals and letters from Spanish explorers and conquistadors during the age of encounters, as well as the writings the English and French travellers made during their visits to Eastern Europe during the Enlightenment, I demonstrate how the Western European Orientalist imaginaries remain persistent through the ages despite the geographical explorations and geopolitical changes, and instead of disappearing, migrate to create the new orients as the realms of European otherness.

Review: Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico. The Casa de Montejo, by C. Cody Barteet

Review: Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico. The Casa de Montejo, by C. Cody Barteet

Figurative aspects suggestive of infectious diseases in the ceramic pots of the pre-Columbian Moche culture. Analysis of the ceramics collection in the Larco Museum of Lima, Peru.

The historical-medical and anthropological studies, regarding Mesoamerica and South America, have been mainly focused on the great empires (Inca, Atzec, Maya), while other civilizations have been less investigated and only recently are gaining interest. In general, the paleopathological research provides interesting data to know the type of nutrition and the general environmental conditions as well as to point out some ritual mutilation practices, which were relatively frequent in the pre-Columbian cultures. A lot of civilizations flourished in the South America before the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadores in the new world. In the last years it is progressively increasing the interest for the study of the Moche culture as well as for a deeper knowledge of pathocenosis of infectious diseases in the Moche society. Human infectious diseases are known to have a frequent animal origin, in particular from domesticated species, although the species domesticated in the pre-Columbian era were a small number. The purpose of our paper has been to examine the archeological findings suggestive of infectious diseases in artistic ceramic pots, dating back to the Moche period. We examined the iconography of ceramic pots belonging to the collection of the Larco Museum in Lima and reproducing body signs suggestive of infectious diseases. We identified 8 handworks with very interesting features by a medical point of view. In these handworks there are signs and lesions possibly associated with infectious diseases: risus sardonicus, orbital edema, facial nerve palsy, dorsal kyphosis, face and skin lesions. These features are compatible with some infectious diseases, including: syphilis, Bartonella bacilliformis, leishmaniasis, Pott's disease and Chagas disease. A wide discussion about these handworks is provided.

The Nearly Impossible Conquest of the Guatemalan Lowlands

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most of Mesoamerica was invaded and colonized by the Spanish conquistadors. We are to believe from their accounts that their triumph over several indigenous communities was inevitable. However, that wasn’t the case as various native groups resisted the Spanish presence during the conquest, which ultimately delayed their colonization. One group that gave the Spaniards trouble during the invasion was the Maya. Although there were several lineages throughout southern Mexico and Central America, it was the Maya in Central Petén that ultimately delayed Spanish colonization in Mesoamerica.
 So, what happened during the conquest of Central Petén? What made this campaign different from others? Why were the Maya in Central Petén more challenging to conquer than other indigenous communities in Mesoamerica? All these questions are answered in this research paper, which documents Maya's advantages during the conquest. Using various sources, primary and secondary, I have shared the research and theoretical perspectives of archeologists, who have unearthed the Mayas' sociocultural continuities they used against the Spaniards, which promotes indigenous agency. In this paper, I ultimately argue that the Spanish were unprepared to handle the Guatemalan lowlands' landscape (which is where Central Petén is located). With a lack of knowledge of the lowlands' geography, the Maya countered the Spanish presence until the seventeenth century.