Stacking Rocks to Transport Water: Folk Aqueduct Bridges of Mallorca and Spanish Colonial California

The landscape of Mallorca, Spain is characterized by a number of features constructed of rock. Windmills and walls are ubiquitous and visually striking. Equally widespread, but not as conspicuous, are other features associated with canal irrigation. One such feature that is understudied and therefore underappreciated is that of folk aqueduct bridges. This study investigates these features because they were critical in sustaining agriculture on the island for centuries, because they deserve recognition in order to be preserved as part of the island’s cultural and historical heritage, and because of their being antecedents or prototypes of similar structures built in Spanish colonial California. Two field seasons were devoted to locating and studying folk aqueduct bridges. Systematic windshield surveys were undertaken to identify such features. Once located, each folk aqueduct bridge was subjected to detailed description and analysis of size, shape, function, materials, and method of construction. Folk aqueduct bridges of Mallorca were built of shaped and unshaped stone, with channels made of ceramic tiles or ashlar tablets. Many of the rock walls once served as folk aqueduct bridges. Several California missionaries in the 18th century came from Mallorca, and the folk aqueduct bridges they built are based on those of their homeland.

Native Insurgent Literacy in Colonial California

The catastrophe of Spanish colonization for California's indigenous populations has made it easy for historians to overlook the skills that some Indians learned in the missions and the ways in which those who survived the missions used these hard-won skills to resist colonial rule and advance their own interests. One such skill was alphabetic literacy, which a select few California Indians in the missions acquired and used in their own distinctive ways. Focusing on the experiences of a few heretofore obscure yet important individuals, this article briefly compares the experiences with alphabetic literacy of Indian men and women over the first few generations of contact and explores the degree to which literacy provided Indians with the means to serve their communities, reinvent themselves, and challenge missionaries’ expectations.

“Time Out of Mind”

This article analyzes the decision of the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians, an unrecognized tribe from San Diego County, to petition for federal recognition through an investigation of the tribe's historical interactions with the non-Native world in colonial California. The San Luis Rey Band's pursuit of federal recognition through the Federal Acknowledgment Process is connected to a larger movement of unrecognized tribes across California to clarify their legal status, and in so doing to widen the possibilities for self-government and economic development and to secure their claims to traditional territories. Shifting the focus to coastal Southern California adds depth to our understanding of how colonization in California impacts contemporary struggles for federal recognition and draws attention to a tribal community's history and experience that is often overshadowed by those of other federally recognized tribes in the region.

Placing Refuge and the Archaeology of Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California

Indigenous negotiations of European colonialism in North America are more complex than models of domination and resistance reveal. Indigenous people—acting according to their own historically and culturally specific ways of knowing and being in the world—developed strategies for remaking their identities, material choices, and social configurations to survive one or multiple phases of colonization. Archaeologists are making strides in documenting the contingencies and consequences of these strategies, yet their focus is often skewed toward sites of contact and colonialism (e.g., missions and forts). This article examines places of refuge for native people navigating colonial programs in the San Francisco Bay area of California. I use a resistance-memory-refuge framework to reevaluate resistance to Spanish missions, including the possible reoccupation of landscapes by fugitive orfurloughed Indians. Commemorative trips to shellmounds and other refuges support the concept of an indigenous hinterland, or landscapes that, in time, provided contexts for continuity and adjustment among Indian communities making social, material, and economic choices in the wake ofmissionization. By viewing colonialism from the outside in, this reoriented approach can potentially enhance connections between archaeological and Native American communities.