Associate Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University

    The Curious Case of Coronado’s Shields: 

                  Towards an Iconology of Pueblo Visual Culture on the Eve of Spanish Colonialism

In 1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado marched forth to conquer, he hoped, the golden kingdoms that were rumored to exist on the far northern frontier of the Spanish Trans-Atlantic Empire. He encountered instead the Pueblo communities of what is today New Mexico and Arizona. This presentation reconsiders a fleeting episode drawn from the Spanish account of Coronado’s violent travels throughout the region: the gift of shields by a Pueblo delegation to their invaders.

To understand this gift requires a complicated cultural inquiry into not just the meanings of Pueblo shields but the images that adorned them, the wider role of iconography in Ancestral Pueblo society, and the very nature of power, agency, and subjectivity within the indigenous traditions of the American West. Furthermore, the curious case of Coronado’s shields also presents an opportunity to consider what archaeology and anthropology have to offer art history, and vice versa.

Thursday, October 3, 2019

6.30pm

832 Schermerhorn Hall