Contributor David J. Weber opens this volume on a pessimistic note as he comments on the malaise currently afflicting Spanish borderlands studies. Not only is this region considered peripheral to Latin American history, but the study of the northern frontier, he contends, has an uncertain future in historical circles. This last of a three-volume series exploring the interaction between Spaniards and Indians and its consequences in the northern borderlands represents the dawn of a new era in borderland studies: the passing of the baton to nonhistorians. The authors of this work, most of whom are archaeologists, attempt to reconnect the borderlands to the rest of colonial Spanish America, and in doing so, boldly set the research agenda for the northern frontier.
Editor David Hurst Thomas, who is curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, divides the book into three loosely related sections. Part 1 reviews borderland scholarship over the last century. Part 2 examines the impact of Spanish colonialism on native societies in southern Mesoamerica and Central America, while part 3 proposes future research directions in borderland studies.
The stated objective of this volume is to offer a synthesis of current understanding about European and indigenous interaction after Columbus, but ultimately the book reads as a methodological and conceptual primer for borderlands studies. On the premise that Spanish strategies and Indian responses learned elsewhere in Spanish America would be discernible on the northern frontier as well, Part 2 is designed to showcase recent revisionist research of historians and social scientists of Mesoamerica and Central America. Parts 2 and 3 openly embrace a multidisciplinary approach, essentially fusing historical archaeology and ethnohistory, which forthrightly rejects the traditional and largely Eurocentric Boltonian scholarship. Thomas asserts that these innovative methods, relying heavily on non-European and unwritten records, will enrich our understanding of the complexity of the encounter in the northern borderlands and facilitate the search for the “several distinct histories” that were played out in this region (p. xix).
Most noteworthy in this volume is the series of opening essays, focusing on how both public celebrations and scholarship have shaped and continue to shape popular perceptions of Native Americans and of their interaction with the European colonizers. The writers portray indigenous groups in Mesoamerica, which by implication were typical of Indians in the borderlands, as innovative, persistent, and adaptable in the face of Spanish colonialism. Also valuable is the discussion on population change, in which historians and archaeologists debate the issue of cultural continuity between the pre-Contact and post-Contact periods.
While its shifting of borderland studies outside a narrow zone of inquiry and connecting it to larger Spanish American processes is laudatory, the book suffers from an absence of explicit comparative points. In the Mesoamerican case studies, most of the essays pertain to indigenous groups of more developed cultural levels than those found on the frontier; the editor fails to make a compelling case for ways in which they relate to the borderlands. Unfortunately for a book written partly for the general public, the volume does not make those critical spatial linkages.
Nevertheless, this ambitious anthology, and the series in general, makes important contributions to the evolving field of borderland studies. As Weber notes, “scholars continue to reinvent the borderlands to fit their current multidisciplinary and comparative interests” (p. 14). With the completion of the trilogy, historical archaeologists have staked their claim to define the field on their terms. We historians have much to learn from their research as well as their means of professional advocacy.
