From the Pass to the Pueblos
From the Pass to the Pueblos

Author: George D. Torok

Publisher: Sunstone Press

Published: 2019-09-07

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1611394295

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El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the Royal Road of the Interior, was a 1,600-mile braid of trails that led from Mexico City, in the center of New Spain, to the provincial capital of New Mexico on the edge of the empire’s northern frontier. The Royal Road served as a lifeline for the colonial system from its founding in 1598 until the last days of Spanish rule in the 1810s. Throughout the Mexican and American Territorial periods, the Camino Real expanded, becoming part of a larger continental and international transportation system and, until the trail was replaced by railroads in the late nineteenth century, functioned as the main pathway for conquest, migration, settlement, commerce, and culture in today’s American Southwest. More than 400 miles of the original trail lie within the United States today, and stretch from present-day San Elizario, Texas to Santa Fe, New Mexico. This segment comprises El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail. It was added to the United States National Trail System in 2000 and is still in use today. This book guides the reader along the trail with histories and overviews of places in New Mexico, West Texas and the Ciudad Juárez area. It includes a broad overview of the trail’s history from 1598 until the arrival of the railroads in the 1880s, and describes the communities, landscape, archaeology, architecture, and public interpretation of this historic transportation corridor.

The Prehistory of Texas
The Prehistory of Texas

Author: Timothy K. Perttula

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2012-09-24

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1603446494

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Paleoindians first arrived in Texas more than eleven thousand years ago, although relatively few sites of such early peoples have been discovered. Texas has a substantial post-Paleoindian record, however, and there are more than fifty thousand prehistoric archaeological sites identified across the state. This comprehensive volume explores in detail the varied experience of native peoples who lived on this land in prehistoric times. Chapters on each of the regions offer cutting-edge research, the culmination of years of work by dozens of the most knowledgeable experts. Based on the archaeological record, the discussion of the earliest inhabitants includes a reclassification of all known Paleoindian projectile point types and establishes a chronology for the various occupations. The archaeological data from across the state of Texas also allow authors to trace technological changes over time, the development of intensive fishing and shellfish collecting, funerary customs and the belief systems they represented, long-term changes in settlement mobility and character, landscape use, and the eventual development of agricultural societies. The studies bring the prehistory of Texas Indians all the way up through the Late Prehistoric period (ca. a.d. 700–1600). The extensively illustrated chapters are broadly cultural-historical in nature but stay strongly focused on important current research problems. Taken together, they present careful and exhaustive considerations of the full archaeological (and paleoenvironmental) record of Texas.

The New Handbook of Texas
The New Handbook of Texas

Author: Ronnie C. Tyler

Publisher:

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 1190

ISBN-13:

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A reference guide to the history of Texas, including biographical sketches of notable individuals, histories of events, themes, counties, cities, and towns, and descriptions of physical features, with attention to the roles of women and minority groups.

Excavation of Two Anasazi Sites in Southern Utah
Excavation of Two Anasazi Sites in Southern Utah

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13:

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"The two reports published here contain elements which contribute substantially to this broader spectrum of Southwestern cultural change. While primarily descriptive in nature, these two site reports, one from the western Kayenta area and one from the margin of the Mesa Verde area and the eastern Kayenta, suggest that the changes which occurred in the more centralized portions of these regions were directly related to what happened on the margins. That, while the site densities and population aggregates may not have been as high, the same factors affected these marginal areas. That conclusion could be expected, but what may not be expected is the differential response which appears to have occurred. After reading these two reports, it appears that it may be possible to discern elements of change in these fringe areas that, once defined, will provide new insight into what happened and why and in what are presently the better known areas of the Southwest. These two papers are important, in sum, not only because they are reports of work in poorly known areas, but because they do provide analyses of fringe areas, they help us to understand the Southwest generally"--From preliminary introduction.

Miera y Pacheco
Miera y Pacheco

Author: John L. Kessell

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2013-08-05

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0806150793

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Remembered today as an early cartographer and prolific religious artist, don Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco (1713–1785) engaged during his lifetime in a surprising array of other pursuits: engineer and militia captain on Indian campaigns, district officer, merchant, debt collector, metallurgist, luckless silver miner, presidial soldier, dam builder, and rancher. This long-overdue, richly illustrated biography recounts Miera’s complex life in cinematic detail, from his birth in Cantabria, Spain, to his sudden and unexplained appearance at Janos, Chihuahua, and his death in Santa Fe at age seventy-one. In Miera y Pacheco, John L. Kessell explores each aspect of this Renaissance man’s life in the colony. Beginning with his marriage to the young descendant of a once-prominent New Mexican family, we see Miera transformed by his varied experiences into the quintessential Hispanic New Mexican. As he traveled to every corner of the colony and beyond, Miera gathered not only geographical, social, and political data but also invaluable information about the Southwest’s indigenous peoples. At the same time, Miera the artist was carving and painting statues and panels of the saints for the altar screens of the colony. Miera’s most ambitious surviving map resulted from his five-month ordeal as cartographer on the Domínguez-Escalante expedition to the Great Basin in 1776. Two years later, with the arrival of famed Juan Bautista de Anza as governor of New Mexico, Miera became a trusted member of Anza’s inner circle, advising him on civil, military, and Indian affairs. Miera’s maps and his religious art, represented here, have long been considered essential to the cultural history of colonial New Mexico. Now Kessell’s biography tells the rest of the story. Anyone with an interest in southwestern history, colonial New Mexico, or New Spain will welcome this study of Miera y Pacheco’s eventful life and times.