Digging Into Daily Life in Mission Espada's Indigenous Quarters

Indigenous people were essential to the purpose, construction and daily running of the Spanish missions, yet much about their everyday lives is unknown. Friars' reports and oral histories help, and archeology adds another view through the things people left behind. It can help answer questions such as: What did people eat? What did they keep in their homes? Which beliefs and traditions did they hold onto?

The researcher

Kelton Sheridan, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, studies Indigenous persistence in the 1700s. For her master's degree at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, she analyzed ceramics from three 18th- and 19th-century households on the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation in Connecticut, and that long-term collaboration between a tribe and archeologists showed her how both sides could benefit.

For her doctorate she wanted to study Indigenous peoples in the colonial period — often misunderstood in archeology, where it is widely assumed that Indigenous peoples disappeared with the arrival of Europeans, through genocide or assimilation. The San Antonio missions, founded in the early 18th century on the frontier of the Spanish empire to gain control over the people and ultimately their land and resources, are an ideal place to study those complex encounters.

What the ground can tell us

Written records show the laws and ideals that shaped colonial society, but they say little about the people who were not their focus. Apart from the friars' limited notes, the daily lives of the missions' Indigenous residents are largely unrecorded — a gap archeology can help fill. In the materials from Mission Espada's Indigenous quarters, Sheridan looks for answers: Were people eating food that was clearly not Spanish? What did they keep in their living spaces? Did they hold on to anything tied directly to precolonial beliefs and traditions?

What archeologists can say depends a great deal on the questions they ask. As Sheridan puts it, even a broken bit of pottery can reveal a lot about cultural practices once it is seen alongside other finds in a particular space. If pottery types from before the missions were still being made and used there, for example, the friars may have let the neophytes keep their ceramic traditions because the annual supply caravan did not bring enough. A very old projectile point found in living quarters might show ancestors being honored by finding and keeping an ancient arrowhead. Some clues are obvious; others are subtle but still important.

Rethinking "assimilation"

Analysis of the finds is still under way, so detailed interpretations are yet to come. But the project reflects a shift in the field. In the mid-20th century, archeologists commonly studied Indigenous cultures before contact and then concluded that, once Europeans arrived, those cultures assimilated so completely that they all but vanished from the archeological record. Recent decades have pushed back, highlighting Indigenous people's everyday lives under colonial rule and reframing those encounters as negotiation and adaptation rather than assimilation and loss. The Mission Espada materials may shed light on how identity was renegotiated through contact between missionaries and Indigenous communities in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Working with descendants

Sheridan excavated alongside members of Indigenous communities who trace their ancestry to people who lived in the missions in the 1700s, including descendants who helped screen for artifacts in October 2023. For many descendants the missions exert a pull that keeps drawing them back — a deeply sacred place where their ancestors lived, worked, raised families and went through good times and bad. The next step for archeology, the article argues, is to keep working with Indigenous communities, making clear that the past does not belong to scientists alone.

Sources

Rewritten from the National Park Service article "Archeological Research at Mission Espada's Indigenous Quarters" (San Antonio Missions National Historical Park), in hubnx's own words; the researcher's remarks are paraphrased. Photographs credited to individual photographers are not reproduced.

• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.