Spanish Soldiers Research Articles

The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships and the Columbian Exchange

IN 1543, A TAINO MAN HAD BEEN living in the mountains in the central southern part of Hispaniola for twelve years. Though fluent in Spanish and familiar with Spanish ways, he had fled to escape the oppressive exploitation of the encomienda. The man survived in the wilderness through a special relationship with three formerly feral pigs, two males and a female. The man and his pigs would go hunting for “wild” pigs, in the same way Europeans hunted prey with dogs—one pig tracking, one seizing, and one assisting, with the Indian giving the final thrust of death with a make-do spear. Once the prey was killed, the man would preside over the ritual distribution of the carcass, as was done in traditional hunts in Europe with dogs, “giving the interior parts to his companions,” while he made a barbecue for himself and salted the flesh for several days’ consumption. When prey was not readily available, the man also foraged for roots and plants, which he ate and shared with his porcine company. “At night,” wrote the conquistador-turned-chronicler Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, “the said Indian went to bed among that bestial company, petting for hours one and then the other, devoted to the swine [la porcesa].” Tragedy ensued, however, when the pigs were spotted by several Spanish soldiers who were in the mountains looking for runaway slaves after a recent rebellion. Assuming that these were feral pigs who roamed the countryside rather than the property of an individual, the soldiers slaughtered them. Bereft over their loss, the man told the three soldiers, “Those pigs gave me life and maintained me as I maintained them; they were my friends and good company; one I gave this name, and the other was called so-and-so, and the female pig was called so-and-so.” Oviedo reported that “the deaths of these three

The Mototícachi Massacre: Authorized Pimas and the Specter of the Insurrectionary Indian

On July 29, 1688, the Pima rancheria of Mototicachi went up in flames. All of its residents—without regard to age or gender—were seized and shackled by a group of soldiers from the Sinaloa presidio. The prisoners were taken to the nearby rancheria of Bacoachi, where forty-two men were killed and the rest were transferred to Sinaloa as prisoners of war. The burning, the imprisonment, and the subsequent executions all were ordered by Nicolas de Higuera, a young corporal from the Sinaloa presidio charged with protecting the Teuricachi Valley against the invasions of the Janos, Jocomes, Sumas, and Apaches. Letters written in the days that followed illustrate Spanish fears that the fire at Mototicachi would cast its embers across the then-peaceful Pimeria Alta. The specter of the insurrectionary Indian hovered in Spanish imagination during the late seventeenth century, ever since the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. In August of that year, the seemingly pacified and friendly Pueblo Indians had synchronized a rebellion that succeeded in expelling all Spaniards from Pueblo lands in northern New Mexico. The blood spilled during that unexpected episode fractured the certainties of Spanish officials and fed paranoid concerns across New Spain that any and all Indians could suddenly turn against the Spanish empire and its colonial settlers. Near the Pimeria Alta, anxieties were further fueled by the frequent theft of livestock and the sporadic killing of Spanish soldiers and vecinos. Although most of these assaults were attributed to enemy groups such as the Janos and Jocomes, on several occasions the Pimas were accused of being either accomplices or solely responsible for the attacks.1 The documentary record illustrates that Spanish authorities,

Caught Looking: Under the Gaze of Inca Atawallpa, 15 November 1532

This article examines vision and cultural authority among the leadership of the Inca Empire of Andean South America. In Inca political society, seeing was cultural being. The essay addresses the spaces in which Inca acts of perception took place, as well as the architectural frameworks that defined the wider mise-en-scène of visual experience there. On 15 November 1532, the the Inca ruler Atawallpa received a group of about twenty Spanish soldiers at a residential complex outside Cajamarca, Perú. When he first saw the Inca king, one soldier recalled, the native ruler was seated “behind a sheet which completely covered him.” Raising a thin veil before the Europeans’ eyes, the Inca marked the sensory faculty of vision, giving it a cultural mode. The Inca ruler’s European antagonists were woven into the fabric of the Inca cultural order, caught looking.

Memories of Defeat and Exile

This article is the story of many who fought and some who died for Spain in the savage Civil War of 1936–1939. Their experiences are here retold from memoirs and other recollections as an inspiration for all who are connected physically or spiritually to an era which saw the agonía of freedom's defeat by a fascist dictatorship. It takes in the accounts of Spanish soldiers, international brigaders, nursing volunteers and others, and shows how in the midst of suffering and brutality it was still possible to live up to humane ideals and even to emerge with dignity.

Latin American Connections: Recent Work on German Interactions with Latin America

German interactions with Latin America have a long history. Indeed, early modern historians have demonstrated that people from German-speaking central Europe took part in all aspects of the European conquest of Central and South America. They have shown that these people were critical to mining operations and publishing in sixteenth-century Mexico; they have found them among Portuguese and Spanish sailors and soldiers almost everywhere; and they have located them playing important roles in a wide range of professions from Mexico to the south of Chile.

Introductory Essay. Art and Evangelization: Creating A New Art in 16th-Century Mexican Missions

Just two years after the Conquest of Mexico in 1521 by Hernando Cortes and his army of Spanish soldiers and Indian allies, a trio of Flemish Franciscans—Pedro de Gante (Pieter of Ghent), Juan de Te...

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis (review)

Reviewed by: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis C. David Rice (bio) The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis. By Patricia Cleary. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. Pp. x, 376. $40.00 cloth) Patricia Cleary offers a new and intriguing study of early St. Louis, concentrating on the Spanish colonial period from the founding of the city in 1764 to the American annexation in 1804. Interpreting the establishment of the colonial outpost as a product of global forces, particularly eighteenth-century Spanish competition with other imperial powers in trade and politics, Cleary contends that the particularities of geography and migration created a cultural and political diversity that undermined Spanish authority. The result was the ultimate failure of a series of commandants from Francisco Riu to Charles de Hault Delassus to impose either order or loyalty. But if the Spanish officials regarded their St. Louis subjects as concerned only with matters of “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” the town, nevertheless, developed as a commercial center that would endure and prosper in the following century. The author retraces familiar ground when she discusses the political and mercantile events of the Spanish period. Still, interesting details are added to our understanding of the initiatives of various lieutenant governors, the diplomacy between local French, Spanish, British, and, later, American officers, and the commercial operations of French trading dynasties such as the Chouteaus and the Gratiots. These will interest the general reader and, if the author is correct in arguing that there is an insufficiency of emphasis on the colonial history of interior America, should be of particular value to students of colonial and early American history. The more important contribution of this history is the excellent selection and recounting of characteristic events in St. Louis community [End Page 99] life, drawn from original sources, and the employment of these examples to illustrate the weakness of Spanish authority and control. Confronted by an unstable population of Native American inhabitants, French settlers and merchants, Spanish soldiers, African and Indian slaves, and British and American interlopers with little to unify them and much to divide them, beleaguered Spanish authorities were ill-equipped to enforce laws or to control or deter destructive behavior. Incompetence played its part, but commandants were often well-meaning and occasionally talented. At bottom, they could not effectively govern because they lacked sufficient military power and were chronically underfunded. Assigned tasks impossible to achieve and granted lukewarm support from subjects or superiors, the lieutenant governors were entangled in forlorn efforts to prevent conflicts between native tribes and between the tribes and European settlers and traders, illegal use and sales of alcohol and firearms, violation of trade restrictions, endless litigation, sexual misconduct, domestic disputes, and multiple challenges to their authority. As the author notes: “St. Louis served as a reminder of the limits to [Spain’s] imperial reach and coffers, with inadequate supplies, poor facilities, and an understaffed garrison all exposing the inability of administrators to fulfill the diplomatic and defensive responsibilities of the post” (p. 306). Cleary is at her best in weaving the variables of governance, religious life, trade, relationships, self-interest, and cultural myopia into a credible image of early St. Louis. She has judiciously reviewed and selected her sources and developed a well-organized narrative that lends authority to the idea that colonial St. Louis deserves the attention more commonly given to the seaboard British colonies. Certainly, the survival of the troubled Spanish post near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers would prove to be of historic importance to the American nation that would raise its flag over St. Louis on March 9, 1804. For if the founding and early evolution of the town was the product of local forces influenced by global imperial ambition, its rise as a city of international prominence was accomplished in the service of the Great Republic. [End Page 100] C. David Rice C. David Rice is emeritus professor of history at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, Missouri. He is the coauthor with William E. Foley of The First Chouteaus: River Barons of Early St. Louis...

Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870–1930 (review)

GOODE, JOSHUA. Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870-1930. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009. xii + 295 pp.One sometimes hears rumblings in certain academic circles that race is an American concern, wholly foreign to modern Spain. Joshua Goode's meticulous study of the multiple attitudes towards racial discourse during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their expression in historiography, imperial (and postimperial) strategy, and policies regarding the descendents of Iberia's Sephardic exiles will quiet those voices: Spain is decidedly not devoid of autochthonous racial thought.Impurities of Blood is a lengthy, comprehensive study of race, racism, and racializing thought in Spain. After a discussion of the medieval and early modern periods, the primary focus is on the decades that coincided with Romanticism and nationalism, the twinned concepts that defined membership among its citizenry by means of cultural and ethnic homogeneity. With careful attention to the subtleties of shifting political winds over the course of the nineteenth century, the author persuasively argues that race was permanently central to Spain's conception of itself, even as its meaning constantly shifted along ideological and political lines. Not only the centralizing nation-state and imperial army, but also Basque nationalism, Sephardic repatriation, and Catholicism were all inflected by the reigning racial theories. In fact, as Goode reveals, race offers a privileged view of the seemingly chaotic social and political history of Spain between 1870 and 1920. Instead of a clear opposition between conservative and liberal visions of Spanish identity, race demonstrated that a far more unified discourse existed within Spanish political and intellectual life at the turn of the twentieth century. There were many more than two Spains (82). The final sections of the book offer an incisive analysis of racial policies in the decades following the Spanish Civil War and World War II.Modern Spanish race developed at the turn of the century as a means of explaining Spanish imperial decline in terms of inherited biological factors and morphological degeneration. Unlike the case for other imperial powers, in Spain race was not a tool to distinguish inferior colonized people from their colonizers, but rather to understand the failure of empire. Anthropology and race theories developed, in part, in an attempt to pinpoint a racial and physical deficiency among Spanish soldiers that could explain their perpetual colonial defeats.The common distinction between race theories in Northern and Southern Europe posits that in the former, race was celebrated as purity and exclusion, while in the latter it was forged through assimilation, fusion, and inclusion. As a result, Spanish race has been seen as somehow positive or welcoming, whereas, for example, German racial thought was negative (leaving aside Nazi policies, for the moment). However, Goode departs from standard historiographical comparisons of European racisms and instead explores how racialized thought was debated and implemented in specific policies in Spain. This methodological approach allows him to illuminate the means by which various racial traditions produce distinct (or similar) racial policies. Go ode's analysis of the ideas and practices that preceded Spanish fascism is complex and nuanced, and truly uncovers how and why particular ideas took hold. Ultimately, the author succeeds in setting aside the idea that race and genocide in Europe must always be defined in relation to the policies of Nazi Germany. He brilliantly dismisses the all too common exculpatory view that because race, eugenics, and population control in Spain under Franco did not reach the murderous heights of the Third Reich, or because race was constructed around a discourse of fusion rather than purity, Spain was and is somehow free from racism.Grounding his arguments on specific political, social, and academic debates, and following the birth and growth of the field of anthropology, Goode details the uses of the conceptualization of Spain as a nation of assimilation and fusion (the racial alloy) by both the left and the right, and its interpretation by writers as diverse as Pio Baroja, Benito Perez Galdos, and Miguel de Unamuno. …

Pedro de Perea and the Colonization of Sonora

Pedro de Perea and the Colonization of Sonora David Yetman (bio) In 1640 or somewhat earlier the first non-clerical Spaniards settled in Sonora and in so doing stirred up a conflict with Sonoran Indians over land rights that lasted for nearly two decades, from roughly 1640 through 1658.1 Jesuit missionaries advised the Indians to take legal action against the settlers. The document that appears in this article portrays the strategy the Indians and their advisors employed to reclaim lands that Spaniards had taken from them. It also reveals the response of Spanish courts to those strategies. Led by a military captain on a civilian mission, Spanish soldiers and settlers (the two often played the same role) ventured into what is now Sonora, not seeking a military conquest but intent on establishing a colony. Their foray had the full backing of the Crown, and they considered their mission a license to civilize the region, i.e., establish an enclave of Spanish culture, institute European customs and norms to guide the "barbarian" native peoples, and, even more important, extract wealth from the land. If Indians stood in the way of convenient development of human and natural resources, so much the worse for them. In this case, the nondescript Eudeve settlement of Tuape on the Río San Miguel, a minor, ephemeral stream in central Sonora, became the location of a struggle that would be repeated numerous times in northwest New Spain in the following 150 years. It would also symbolize the conflicting currents in Spanish expansionism: evangelizing and pacifying native peoples versus expanding the royal treasury and establishing Spanish colonies in lands claimed by the king. The conflict would set the stage for Sonora's colonization and outsiders' eventual appropriation of Indian lands and Indian water. The clash of forces would continue through the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 and on through Mexican independence. It [End Page 33] continues today in the form of the neoliberal drive against cooperatively and communally owned lands in Mexico. In the Tuape case, the facts clearly favored the Indians, as all parties acknowledged, yet the authorities were reluctant to rule in their favor. With evidence presented by a Jesuit who knew the Indians well, supported by the Indians' intimate knowledge of the land and their stubborn persistence and the demonstrable improbability of the Spaniards' land claims, the Spanish courts were forced to recognize the validity of the Indians' petition. Still, the courts, as far as the documentary record demonstrates, did not rule against the settlers. Instead, they brought pressure on the Spaniards involved to relinquish their holdings without issuing a formal ruling against them. Prior to 1640 the only Europeans to be found in Sonora,2 apart from a smattering of prospectors in search of precious metals, were priests—a couple of dozen Jesuits and a small handful of Franciscans. These resided in newly created mission communities, not on landed estates under private ownership. Indeed, the Crown entrusted Jesuits with "pacifying" the natives, converting them to Catholicism, and shaping them into a new breed of peasantry freed from their "savage" past, humbly, quietly, and piously tilling the land and reaping harvests. Native uprisings had frustrated the Crown's earlier attempts at colonization in what would come to be called the Opatería, roughly corresponding with northeastern Sonora. In 1540 Francisco Vásquez de Coronado attempted to found a settlement at Corazones, probably on the Río Sonora. Coronado left forty soldiers in charge when he departed for the north. After suffering profound mistreatment at the hands of Spaniards, the natives, probably Teguimas, revolted and obliterated the colony, killing all but four of its Spanish settlers. After the Corazones debacle, indigenous Sonorans—Teguimas, Eudeves, Nébomes, Pimas, and Seris (as Spaniards came to call them), seem to have resisted settlement by outsiders. Teguimas and Eudeves became so renowned for the deadly accuracy with which they shot volleys of poisoned arrows at intruders (and perhaps each other), that most expeditions left Sonorans to their own devices.3 By early in the seventeenth century a more systematic Spanish campaign of pacification and conversion of Indians had reached Ostimuri, the land of the Yaquis and Mayos that...

Evidence of a Louse-Borne Outbreak Involving Typhus in Douai, 1710-1712 during the War of Spanish Succession

BackgroundThe new field of paleomicrobiology allows past outbreaks to be identified by testing dental pulp of human remains with PCR.MethodsWe identified a mass grave in Douai, France dating from the early XVIIIth century. This city was besieged during the European war of Spanish succession. We tested dental pulp from 1192 teeth (including 40 from Douai) by quantitative PCR (qPCR) for R. prowazekii and B. quintana. We also used ultra-sensitive suicide PCR to detect R. prowazekii and genotyped positive samples.Results and DiscussionIn the Douai remains, we identified one case of B. quintana infection (by qPCR) and R. prowazekii (by suicide PCR) in 6/21 individuals (29%). The R. prowazekii was genotype B, a genotype previously found in a Spanish isolate obtained in the first part of the XXth century.ConclusionLouse-borne outbreaks were raging during the XVIIIth century; our results support the hypothesis that typhus was imported into Europe by Spanish soldiers from America.

La luna roja (review)

Reviewed by: La luna roja Joanne Lucena Leante, Luis. La luna roja. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2009. Pp. 393. ISBN 978-84-204-7479-3. Luis Leante's latest novel, La luna roja, shares many of the same characteristics that made his prior novel, Mira si yo te querré, winner of the Alfaguara prize for 2007, such a resounding success. Both texts astutely examine distinct cultures vastly different from Spain's; in La luna roja Leante explores both Jewish and Muslim Turkey, whereas in Mira si yo te querré the author observes cultural differences in Spanish-occupied Western Sahara between the Spanish soldiers and the Muslim natives. The principal protagonist of La luna roja, René Kuhnheim Cano, a half-German half-Spaniard raised in Turkey who has spent his adult life in Spain, has to return to his past to delve into unresolved issues that prohibit his moving forward in the present. The concept of how resolution and the reconciliation of past and present affect romantic relationships is also a theme in the two novels. The novel opens in Alicante when René is asked to give a lecture at his friend's tertulia on a famous novel, La luna roja, by the Turkish author Emil Kemal, whose work René translated years ago. René, a once famous but currently frustrated author who is relegated to writing magazine articles and cannot seem to pen a new novel, agrees to attend but proceeds to argue with one of the participants about the details of Kemal's life. The young woman, Aurelia, insists that René knows nothing about the Turkish author's life and that La luna roja was written after the author suffered heartbreak from his relationship with the Sephardic Jew, Orpa. Soon afterward, René receives a mysterious phone call in Turkish from an unknown woman asking him to help Emil Kemal, whose life is in grave danger. René rushes to his apartment, where he finds the renowned author dead on the floor with a book of René's resting on his chest. The book is not the one that René had dedicated to Kemal but the one directed to Kemal's wife and René's lover, Derya, to whom René expresses his ardent desire. René is forced to confront his repressed (he had not seen Kemal for eleven years prior to the mysterious phone call) and [End Page 162] unresolved past with Kemal and Derya. He must also reconcile with his youth in Turkey and his obsession with Tuna, his first real love. René begins to receive copies of Kemal's diaries from the mysterious woman, Aurelia, and finds himself embroiled in the Turkish author's past. Aurelia insists that René, as an expert of his works and friend of Kemal, must write his history so that the world can know what happened to the enigmatic author. René is forced on a journey of self-discovery both in Germany and Turkey while trying to solve the mystery that was Emil Kemal's life. It is fascinating to observe how René, who is used to navigating various cultures, identifies himself and how his identification is based on his relationships with the people in each country rather than the country itself. The novel skillfully alternates between the narrations of the present day of René (told in first person), that of René's past (narrated in third person), and that of Emil Kemal (recounted in third person) as René reads his diaries. The diaries relate Kemal's troubled, isolated childhood, which is only alleviated by his writing. Leante sensitively describes the story of Kemal's love for Orpa, a young Jewish girl, and his close relationship with his Jewish tutor, Mr. Yeter, while astutely examining Muslim and Jewish relationships in Turkey. Orpa, as a practicing Jew, cannot ever marry Kemal, but it is obvious she has feelings for the young writer. Leante also includes details of Turkish history from 1955 and the attacks on Christian and Armenian businesses at the hands of some nationalists. Leante's characters underline the possibility of all three cultures coexisting harmoniously. Kemal's love for Orpa is paralleled by that of René for Tuna, a young Muslim woman whose family would not...

"Subject to the Right of the Secretary of the Interior": The White Mountain Apache Reclamation of the Fort Apache and Theodore Roosevelt School Historic District

In Apache, we believe igoya'i beegozaa, sits in places. Our Mountains, our Springs, other places, all hold stories that tell us who we are and how to live. We have many places that hold wisdom in our Homeland. We also have Fort Apache. We did not build it, but we were the reason it was built. It was a military post. The year was 1869. We had seen Europeans before when Coronado passed through our lands in the 1500s. We held off the Spanish soldiers and later the Mexican soldiers for 300 years. Then finally, the Americans came in great numbers and built a Fort on our land. We all knew that life * would never be the same again. >

Psychological contract breach and social identity: Their influences on Spanish soldiers' job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behaviour

A study, using a longitudinal two-wave model, and dialing with the effects of both perceived psychological contract breach and social identity on organisational citizenship behaviour and job satisfaction in a sample of Spanish professional soldiers, is reported here. It was found that social identity mediates the effects of perceived breach on outcomes, and that participants that highly identified with the organisation showed a higher degree of satisfaction with fulfilment of promises regarding salary and secure job. Results concerning job satisfaction showed that this variable is not a mere effect of social identity, but rather that it is also shaped by the distinct meaning that fulfilment of promises has for low and high identifiers within a given context.

Schichten spanischer Familiennamen in Deutschland

The first stratum of Spanish surnames in Germany goes back to Spanish soldiers fighting on German soil during the wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, the second one to Jewish immigrants of Spanish (and Portuguese) origin, who settled down in Northern Germany around 1600, and the third one to workers' immigration and exile in the second half of the 20th century. Special attention is given to the last stratum (problems connected with the use of telephone directories as a source, frequent Spanish surnames in present Germany, tendencies of linguistic integration).

Gendering America: Women and the American Landscape in Tirso de Molina's Trilogía de los Pizarros

Although Spain had been aware of the existence of the Americas since Columbus's journey, early modern Spanish dramatists rarely set their plays there. This scarcity of Golden Age comedias about the New World, together with the difficulty of adapting a distant reality for theater audiences, underscores the importance of the relatively few plays that portray the Americas. In this essay, I argue that Tirso recreated the exotic nature of the New World in the Pizarro trilogy by gendering America's landscape through the creation of remarkable female inhabitants and by breaking the comedia 's and Spanish society's gender conventions. Writers have long associated women with nature and lands to conquer, but Tirso grants predominance over nature and over Spanish soldiers to his American women, while making problematic the relationship between men and the natural world. The fate of the American women at the end of the plays seems to leave open the possibility for a new relationship between men and women and between human beings and nature in the Americas. (GHS)

Transforming an Eighteenth‐Century Archive into a Twenty‐First‐Century Database: The Early California Population Project

AbstractThe Early California Population Project is a database recently completed by research scholars at the Henry E. Huntington Library. The project is part of a wave of new databases that are opening up various regions of Early America for additional study; yet, unlike other databases, the Early California Population Project's records are overwhelmingly of Indians. The database offers new opportunities for historians and anthropologists interested in Indians, Catholic missions, Spanish soldiers and settlers, and family and community formation along the Spanish colonial frontier of North America between 1769 and 1850.

¿Eran los rusos culpables? Imagen del enemigo y políticas de ocupación de la División Azul en el frente del este, 1941-1944

Within the general framework of the war of extermination planned by the Third Reich in its war against the Soviet Union, this essay attempts to analyse the role played by the Spanish Volunteer Division (the «Blue Division») that was dispatched to the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1944. After deconstructing the image of the Spanish experience in Russia transmitted from 1943 to the present day in autobiographies and novels written by war veterans, the article addresses the question of how far has the Spanish Division differed in its policy of occupation from troops in the Wehrmacht. Two points are therefore outlined: first, the image of the enemy which was developed by the Spanish volunteers, which was not permeated by biological racism but to a certain extent by a feeling of cultural superiority; and second, the Blue Division´s behaviour towards the Russian civil population. The sources used are autobiographical accounts written by Spanish veterans, war diaries and letters written by German and Spanish soldiers as well as by Russian civilians, along with oral interviews with Russian peasants.

Barbaros: Spaniards and their savages in the Age of Enlightenment

Two centuries after Cortes and Pizarro seized the Aztec and Inca empires, Spain's conquest of America remained unfinished. Indians retained control over most of the lands in Spain's American empire. Mounted on horseback, savvy about European ways and often possessing firearms, independent Indians continued to find new ways to resist subjugation by Spanish soldiers and conversion by Spanish missionaries. In this panoramic study, David Weber explains how late eighteenth-century Spanish administrators tried to fashion a more enlightened policy toward the people they called barbaros, or 'savages'. Even Spain's most powerful monarchs failed, however, to enforce a consistent, well-reasoned policy toward Indians. At one extreme, powerful independent Indians forced Spaniards to seek peace, acknowledge autonomous tribal governments and recognise the existence of tribal lands, fulfilling the Crown's oft-stated wish to use 'gentle' means in dealing with Indians. At the other extreme the Crown abandoned its principles, authorising bloody wars on Indians when Spanish officers believed they could defeat them. Power, says Weber, more than the power of ideas, determined how Spaniards treated 'savages' in the Age of Enlightenment.

The introduction of Old World crops (wheat, barley and peach) in Andean Argentina during the 16th century a.d.: archaeobotanical and ethnohistorical evidence

It was believed for a long time that the first Old World crops were introduced to the northwest of Argentina in a.d. 1550 during the foundation of Barco, and that the indigenous people incorporated them into their subsistence almost passively. However, since wheat, barley, and peach have been recovered from El Shincal, an Inka (Inca) administrative centre, new questions have arisen about who first brought these crops to the study region, as well as about where they were grown for the first time and which routes they followed after that. This paper will try to solve these questions during a period ranging from the 16th to the 18th century. This time span, although arbitrary, is consistent with the major damage to the original social structure caused by the Spaniards to the local indigenous populations. Our approach includes the comparison of ethnohistorical with archaeobotanical evidence. It is concluded that the first Old World crops were brought from Chile to Santiago del Estero by Spanish soldiers in a.d. 1556, and to Londres in a.d. 1558. These crops were taken up by local indigenous people during the period of the encomenderos and used to carry out a pachamanca ceremony at El Shincal during a Diaguita rebellion.

San Diego Presidio: A Vanished Military Community of Upper California

Popular views of San Diego Presidio portray it as a fortified community, inhabited largely by Spanish soldiers, who followed customs that were predominantly European. Ongoing documentary and archaeological research suggest that these views represent an inaccurate picture of the settlement and its people. For more than a third of its years of existence (1769-1835), the presidio was not protected by any fortifications. Throughout its history, the population of the base included large numbers of civilians. The people of the presidio represented a racially mixed community. The way of life that they pursued included elements that drew heavily on local Native American, and Mesoamerican, cultural roots.