Affiliation: University of Texas at Austin
Mariah Wade is Associate Professor of Anthropology with the University of Texas at Austin, and holds her degrees in Anthropology and Archaeology from the same. Her research interests include archaeology and ethnohistory of North America, colonial and post-colonial American Southwest, and Iberian Bronze and Iron Ages and Roman Period. Her recent publications include Missions, Missionaries and Native Americas: long-term processes and daily practices (2008, University Press of Florida), “You are What you Eat: Toying with the Process of Becoming”, in Toys and Communication (2017, L. Magalhães and J. Goldstein eds., Springer Publishers), “Portuguese presence in Spanish Colonial North America in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries” in Mechanisms of Global Empire Building. (2017, A. Polonia and C. Antunes eds, Porto: CITCEM-Afrontamento); her current project is A Land Between Rivers: the castro archaeology of northwestern Portugal (in preparation).
The insertion of a mission into the lived landscape of a Native American population and the mission’s layout reflected an assessment of how the mission could function and achieve its aims among that population. Hunting and gathering populations required different layouts than agriculturists, and missionaries made decisions that often reflected their missionary works in Iberia and elsewhere, and the ignorance of Native Americans socio-cultural and ritual lives. Native American populations were not consulted. This talk will discuss the differences between missions established for hunting and gathering populations and for agriculturists and how those differences affected missionaries and Native Americans.
