Heritage, Volume 11, Number 1, Winter 1993 Page: 27
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are the keys to survival.
Don Diego de Vargas ranks as the folk
hero and galvanizer of the Spanish recolonization
of New Mexico some 12 years
following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. He
served as Governor of a wretchedly impoverished
El Paso settlement, where
the tattered ranks of those who had occupied
northern New Mexico for more than
100 years had been driven by the united
Pueblos. From that position he unified the
colony against Apache, Manso, Suma, and
other Indians in the south, and forged the
reconquest of the northern Rio Grande by
a timely display of force and courage. His
career spanned three decades in the New
World, from the 1670s to his death on a
campaign against raiding Apaches near
Bernalillo.
These two recently published volumes
join the first of several planned in a series
on the Journals of Don Diego de Vargas.
"Letters from the New World" is an abridged
version of the first in the series, "Remote
Beyond Compare: Letters of Don Diego de
Vargas to His Family from New Spain and
New Mexico, 1675-1706," which was published
in 1989. They are the fruits of more
than a decade of efforts by John Kessel and
later by Rick Hendricks and Meredith
Dodge, and the project has been supported
by several major grants and by association
with the University of New Mexico.
Though his career was illustrious by
frontier standards, he was not noted in the
"Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada," a
standard reference, except as a participant
in the New Mexican reconquest. But the
authors of these volumes provide a fulsome
portrait of not only an historic character,
but of the complete man, scion to a midlevel
family of some wealth, considerable
debt, extraordinary organizational ability,
and apparent military prowess and bravery.
Through these two volumes we see the
human face of Diego de Vargas as he entreats
for the welfare of his abandoned
family in Spain, in his Letters, and we see
his formal and administrative life as depicted
in his dispatches and other documents from
the years as Governor of New Mexico.
The historic documentation of the
Vargas years is a welcome contribution to
regional scholarship; along with the
readable and fresh translations, the Vargas
Project has made available a fine resourcefor further research. In addition to historical
investigations, anthropologists and archaeologists
will be pleased to mine this
material for first-hand accounts, demographic data, ethnographic material, and
physical and locational information for
discovery and study of Spanish Colonial
and Historic Puebloan and other Indian
sites and settlements.
The Origins of Agriculture
and Settled Life
By Richard S. MacNeish, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman
If you're not satisfied with the popular
treatment of "Chilies to Chocolates," or if
you hunger for a more systematic and comprehensive
account of world agricultural
development, you might like to wade into
MacNeish's global synthesis of the pathways
to sedentary and agricultural life.
MacNeish has been in the forefront of
cultural ecological theory since his early
field experience in Tamaulipas where he
and co-workers discovered "three tiny
corncobs tied with agave string...the depth
told me it was 3,000 to 5,000 years old. It
was the earliest corn ever found, and it was
to change the course of my life." He was
invited to show the corncobs to Paul Mangelsdorf,
Walton Galinat, and Peggy Mangelsdorf,
the deans of ethnobotanical studies
at the time, and launched "the Great Corn
Hunt", as he called it, which has taken him
on a lifelong search for early domesticates
and on a theoretical journey regarding the
origins of settled and agricultural life.
This book is a masterful and thorough
synthesis of the results of much of the last
50 years of archaeological research into the
problem of emerging sedentism and adoption
of agriculture. MacNeish sets out a
systematic explanation of several potential
pathways from hunting and gathering
lifeways through various possible scenarios
of foraging and horticultural sedentism,
and presents a model that he proposes as a
means of evaluating the pathways toward
sedentism and agriculture in major areas of
the world.
For some, his argument may be overly
materialistic, though he steers a course
away from the materialists such as Vavilov
and Anderson and Sauer; for others he may
be too much of an environmentalist, despitehis rejection of deterministic processes. His
treatment of the historiography of the field
may engender some debate as to how muchso-and-so is such-and-such regarding these
major divisions in the theoretical developments
of the last half-century of anthropological
theory. Nonetheless, MacNeish
was there, and his history of the discipline
could be recounted on a first-name basis.
This may be one of the greatest strengths
of this book. By sheer weight of personal
experience and intellectual engagement,
MacNeish encompasses the whole world in
this text, and for any area of the world that
the reader cares to explore, MacNeish captures
the essential research background and
the cogent elements of regional development
by which he can evaluate his theory
of variable pathways.
Despite the omnipresence of a cultural
ecological paradigm, MacNeish acknowledges
at times the potential for ideological
and serendipitous factors and admits to
exceptions to his model of the emergence
of settlement systems that he proposes. In
the Jomon culture of Japan, for instance,
sedentary lifeways may have been fully
developed before any domesticates or
farming lifeways developed. In the American
Southwest, some areas developed into
farming villages more rapidly than others.
People in the El Paso area, for example,
apparently did not settle in farming villages
until hundreds of years after those in the
north and western parts of the Rio Grande
valley of the San Juan valley or the Little
Colorado Plateau. Perhaps, MacNeish allows,
there may have been non-materialistic
factors that influenced these regional
differences.
For MacNeish though, the principal goal
is to get it out on paper, and let the discussion
flow from there. He trims the sails of
his argument toward a course full of confidence
in the power of the scientific method
and the emergence of scientific truth. At
the same time, this book is the exuberant
and personal account of one man's engagement
with the life of exploration, the life of
the mind, and the sheer joy of learning.
John Peterson is a professional archaeologist
and the book review editor of HERITAGE.a~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
_5~~~~~ _HERiIAG * WINTER 1993 27
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Texas Historical Foundation. Heritage, Volume 11, Number 1, Winter 1993, periodical, Winter 1993; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth45415/m1/27/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Historical Foundation.