LIVING IN THE PURÍSIMA CONCEPCIÓN: ARCHITECTURAL FORM, CULTURAL NEGOTIATION, AND EVERYDAY PRACTICE IN A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NEW MEXICO MISSION AMONG THE ZUNI INDIANS

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  • March 22, 2019
Creator
  • Burgio-Ericson, Klinton
    • College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Art and Art History, Art History
Abstract
  • This dissertation is an interdisciplinary case study of Spanish mission architecture and material culture among Pueblo Indian communities of Early Modern New Mexico. The domestic quarters (conventos) of seventeenth-century missions were intimate arenas of encounter and cultural negotiation, where Native American laborers lived and worked with Franciscan friars, comprising heterogeneous mission communities. Missionaries established the Purísima Concepción outside the Zuni town of Hawikku (Hawikuh) Pueblo in 1629, where it was destroyed in a 1672 Apache raid. In 1919, Frederick Webb Hodge and Jesse L. Nusbaum of the Hendricks-Hodge Archaeological Expedition excavated the ruins, producing collections which eventually become part of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) but remain largely unpublished. As one of the few systematically excavated seventeenth-century New Mexico missions, the Purísima Concepción is a vital resource for understanding everyday mission life. Interpreting the Purísima Concepción’s archaeological remains with primary sources, Zuni oral traditions, and comparative analysis, this dissertation reconstructs the everyday built environment of Hawikku’s convento, rich with materials of labor and cultural concepts of gender. The cloister design at the adobe mission’s core was an architectural form with monastic and vernacular precedents, which missionaries employed as an architectural rhetorical statement communicating aspirations of orderly acculturation. In contrast, artifacts related to everyday culinary practices of food preparation and consumption mixed cultural traditions, manifesting Native agency, Pueblo cosmology, and the overlooked role of women in shaping mission community experiences. Through Native participants and material culture such as culturally hybrid ceramics including soup plates, candle holders, and a unique salt cellar made by Zuni and Hopi artists (sometimes described as colonowares), Pueblo concepts of gender and cosmology interpenetrated the missionaries’ patriarchal Christian¬ity. The result was a hybrid environment combining both Spanish and Pueblo cultural systems. Focusing on intercultural relations, everyday life, and Indigenous agency, this dissertation explores a particular example of the multi-vocality of art’s history in the Americas. It shifts scholarly attention from mission churches and Spanish colonial power, to the domestic spaces of conventos and the meaning of missions as rhetorical constructions negotiated among participants of the mission community.
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Advisor
  • Steponaitis, Vincas
  • Herman, Bernard
  • Douglas, Eduardo
  • Williams, Lyneise
  • Galletti, Sara
Degree
  • Doctor of Philosophy
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Graduation year
  • 2018
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Date uploaded
  • June 13, 2018

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