SALINAS "In the Midst of a Loneliness": The Architectural History of the Salinas Missions

ARCHEOLOGY AT LAS HUMANAS (continued)

Excavations in San Isidro

San Isidro remained an almost unrecognizable ruin through most of the first two decades of Park Service management. During the stabilization work conducted in 1942, Joe Toulouse excavated some of the sanctuary area of San Isidro while refilling a treasure-hunter's pit in the area where the main altar had been. He saw enough of the side altars to recognize them. [69] Not until 1951, however, was San Isidro excavated in its entirety. Along with his work in mound A, Gordon Vivian emptied the church of rubble and carefully exposed the surviving structural traces of the sanctuary area. [70] Vivian worked out a probable reconstruction of the sanctuary structures, a probable roofing method, and a probable construction history. The present report has reevaluated his conclusions, and disagreed with most of them. This does not lessen the importance or the quality of Vivian's work at San Isidro, but indicates that the general knowledge available to draw on has increased considerably since Vivian made his final revisions to the manuscript of Gran Quivira in 1953. [71] Since that time, the excavations of several seventeenth-century church sanctuaries has gathered a great deal of information on how these structures looked. Probably the most important single excavation was that of the Chapel of San Miguel in Santa Fe, published by Stanley Stubbs and Bruce T. Ellis in 1955. [72] The plan of the sanctuary area of the church as it was built in the early 1600s is almost identical to the plan of the sanctuary of San Isidro, built about the same time, with the exception that San Isidro is thirty percent larger in all dimensions. In the case of San Miguel, however, enough of the sanctuary was left to make it clear what the various structures were that stood there. This allowed a revision of Vivian's work, with the results presented in Chapter 7 of the present report.

Garland Gordon, 1962

During February of 1962, Garland Gordon excavated in the southeast corner of San Isidro, examining a circular arrangement of stone noticed by Caretaker Jack Kite. The excavation revealed that the stones were the top of a circular structure about two feet in diameter with a central hole about ten inches in diameter. The central hole widened to about fifteen inches in diameter and was excavated to a depth of about two feet. At this depth Gordon found a layer of ash. The fill of the hole was compacted clay with plaster fragments. [73]

Gordon called this structure a sacrarium, or holy water drain. The outside of the stone structure had been plastered at least twice, each time in three layers. The lowest layer was brown, the second white, and the third red. The same plaster layers were found on a finished floor surface to a distance of at least four inches from the sacrarium base. The hole had no plaster or detectable stonework.

Gordon excavated around the sacrarium for a distance of 1 1/2 feet to the west and north, and to the wall on the south and east. He found a finished floor throughout the area, with two surfaces. The lower was associated with the first layer of plaster on the sacrarium and was about seven inches below the present surface and the top of the sacrarium. The second floor surface, associated with the second plastering episode, was about 1 1/2 inches above the lower floor surface. Both plaster surfaces curved up to the sides of the sacrarium. Gordon speculated that the Franciscans had painted the entire sacrarium white, and then painted a red dado on the lower portion.

As part of the floor examination, Gordon cleared the floor toward the northeast to the edge of the main doorway. In the center of the south side of the doorway, Gordon found a rectangular stone feature perhaps one foot square which he thought might have been the masonry support for the pivot of the door. He did not examine the same point on the north side of the doorway.

Gordon said that the four stones on the floor at the east end were not bases for pillars, but covered post holes left by such pillars. He cited the observations of Jack Kite, who cleaned out the four holes himself during Vivian's excavation of San Isidro. [74]

On the recommendation of Regional Archeologist Charlie Steen, the floor was reburied and a replica of the sacrarium stonework was built above the original.

National Park Service Excavations in San Buenaventura

In 1951, Gordon Vivian summarized previous work within the church and convento of San Buenaventura. [75] The present report refined Vivian's summary somewhat, but still virtually no information about what was found in San Buenaventura from 1923 to 1930 can be recovered. No further effective excavations in the church and convento took place until the work of Charles Voll and Roland Richert in 1962. [76]

The work of Voll and Richert clearly revealed that the church, sacristy and baptistry of Las Humanas had never been finished. Their investigations defined the episodes of fill dumping within the retaining wall foundations outlining the complex. They showed how the foundations of individual rooms had been built in trenches excavated into the fill. Most important, they found the traces left by construction workers. The construction crew had abandoned a ten-foot-wide adobe puddling pit, piles of caliche and other materials in the sacristy, and left hard-packed "construction floors" throughout the church, sacristy, and baptistry. [77]

Voll and Richert followed the compacted "construction floor" from the sacristy doorway northward across the transept in one trench, and from the east side of the transept down the center of the church to the wall of the apse in a second trench at right angles to the first. The trenches found no indication of any structures in the sanctuary area, even though the packed "construction floor" was intact except for random treasure-hunter's holes. [78] The sum of the evidence collected by Voll and Richert shows beyond a reasonable doubt that San Buenaventura was not completed.

In 1986, the Park Service conducted additional excavations in the church. This was a single unit by Kate Spielman of the University of Iowa, Morgan Rieder working with the Historic American Buildings Survey, and the author. The unit was placed in the main entranceway of the church, and was intended to check statements made in 1923 by Anna O. Shepard and Ida Squires that there were steps here going down towards the interior. [79] Photographs taken at the time Shepard and Squires were at Las Humanas, or "Tabirá," as they called it, showed nothing that could be interpreted as steps, but the possibility required checking. [80]

The excavation revealed the irregular top of the foundation wall running beneath the entrance, a construction surface similar to that seen by Voll and Richert, and a postmold that appears to have been left by a scaffolding pole. The excavation found no indication of steps. [81]

Excavations in the Pueblo of Las Humanas

Several of the house mounds of Las Humanas have been sampled by archeology. The least productive of these tests were those conducted by Edgar L. Hewett and his students in the 1920s. Virtually no results of this work are on record, either published or as notes on file in the central collections at the University of New Mexico or the Museum of New Mexico. [82]

In 1951, Gordon Vivian excavated the house mound designated mound A. During March, April and May of 1951, he carefully emptied the rooms of the west half of the mound. This excavation was the first scientifically recorded work at Las Humanas, and the data gathered by Vivian was critical for the evaluation of Tompiro culture and the planning of later excavations. Vivian published his detailed report on these excavations in 1961. The report was reprinted in 1979.

Building on Vivian's work, Alden Hayes excavated all of mound 7 from 1965 to 1968. This excavation, published in two volumes of reports and analysis, forms the core block of data about Tompiro culture, architecture and archeology. In addition, Hayes's discovery of the Franciscan rooms at the west end of mound 7 produced the only detailed archeological information about the Franciscan method of establishing a mission at a pueblo. Without Hayes's work, much of the detailed deductions presented in the present report about the sequence of structural and historical events at Las Humanas could not have been possible.

The Identification and Excavation of Tabirá (Pueblo Blanco, LA 51)

Bandelier first attempted to identify the pueblo of Tabirá, based on references to it in the records available to him in the 1880s. He concluded that the pueblo of Las Humanas was Tabirá, a misidentification that persisted for almost fifty years. [83] In the mid-1930s, France Scholes, the foremost historian working on the colonial history of New Mexico, began to suspect that Bandelier's name for Gran Quivira was wrong and that the pueblo called Tabirá was still unidentified, somewhere in the general vicinity of Gran Quivira.

Scholes visited Gran Quivira in November, 1936, while examining pueblo ruins in the area. He appears to have been searching for the ruins of a church, attempting to find the true Tabirá. Scholes discussed his suspicions with George Boundey, who had become custodian of Gran Quivira in March. [84] Boundey agreed to examine some ruins that Scholes had not been able to locate, and to send Scholes a report on them. [85]

When he discussed his conversation with Scholes in his monthly report, Boundey outlined his impression of Scholes's position. Boundey stated that the documentary evidence implied that Gran Quivira was not Tabirá, but the "Mother Mission," with Tabirá a "smaller pueblo, a Visita of the Mother Mission." [86]

Boundey searched for physical evidence to support this idea for the next year and a half. Finally, in March, 1938, he found the place. In the Southwestern Monuments Monthly Report for that month he announced that, accompanied by one "Reverend Hillard," he had located the pueblo, and stated that the easily-recognizable church ruins were "the true church of Tiberia [Tabirá]." [87] Frank Pinkley, Regional Director at the time, disagreed with Boundey's identification, on the grounds that Tabirá should have two churches, one built in about 1630 and the other in about 1650. [88]

Boundey took a group of 21 people to his "church" site in June, 1938. The group was made up of professors and graduate students from the University of New Mexico. Boundey's report on this outing contained more details about the church (including estimates of its length, width and orientation), sacristy, and campo santo. [89] In spite of the doubts of Pinkley (and apparently everybody else who read his statement), Boundey turned out to be right: he had indeed located "the true church" of Tabirá.

In January, 1939, Joseph Toulouse wrote a brief summary of historical evidence pertaining to Gran Quivira, based on the recently published third volume of Historical Documents relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, and Approaches Thereto, to 1773, translated and edited by Charles Wilson Hackett. [90] Here, Toulouse suggested that Gran Quivira National Monument was the place called "Las Humanas" in the documents, and that Tabirá and Las Humanas were the same place. Toulouse assumed this because both pueblos were said to have had churches in the records, and Toulouse knew of no other church in the area. [91] Toulouse then outlined the construction of the churches and the history of the pueblo in the Spanish colonial period along the same lines followed by France Scholes a year later. In November, 1940, after becoming the new custodian of Gran Quivira, Toulouse again summarized the current picture of the history of Las Humanas and Tabirá, incorporating the work of Kubler and Scholes firmly identifying Gran Quivira as Las Humanas. [92] In this summary, Toulouse proposed that "an Indian village east of Gran Quivira, not previously reported, yielding late sherds and majolica ware of the Spanish period," and containing "a small structure in one of the plazas which might be attributable [sic] to a small chapel," could be Tabirá. Toulouse had gotten this information, not from George Boundey, but from H. P. Mera. Mera had just completed his survey of the "Rio Grande Glaze Paint" area, and had noticed the ruins at the site he designated no. 51 (now LA 51, Pueblo Blanco), even though he did not mention them in the two papers he published in 1940, both briefly describing the site. [93]

The identification of Gran Quivira as Las Humanas by Kubler and Scholes in 1939 and 1940 cleared up many historical questions, but the question of the identity of Tabirá dropped from discussion until eighteen years later, in 1958. Channing Howell, then Superintendent of Gran Quivira, noticed George Boundey's remarks in the Gran Quivira files of Monthly Reports about a pueblo with a church ruin in the area of Las Humanas. He wrote to Boundey asking him for the name of the pueblo if he could remember it, its general location if he couldn't, and any other details he might recall about the place. [94] Boundey replied with his best recollection of the location of the pueblo, and promised to visit Gran Quivira in the fall to supply any further information he could. [95]

In September, 1958, Boundey stopped at Gran Quivira. Although he could not improve on his estimated location of the pueblo, he did apparently recall the name of one of the students who had accompanied him in his June, 1938, visit, a W. D. Crozier. Richard Howard, the archeologist at Gran Quivira at the time, took over the search for Tabirá. He wrote to Crozier, then at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, asking him for any further information about the pueblo. Crozier responded in late March, 1959, saying that he thought the name of the pueblo had been "Pueblo Blanco," and including a photograph of the church ruins taken in 1938. [96] In the meantime, Howard had visited Pueblo Blanco on March 9, feeling that it was one of the most likely candidates to be the pueblo described by Boundey. He returned from the visit convinced that the ruin in the plaza of the pueblo was that of a church. [97]

During Howard's visit in March, 1959, he found that treasure hunters had uncovered a portion of the west end of the "peculiar" pueblo ruin. Howard scraped rubble from adjoining wall tops and found that the place was almost certainly a Spanish-built structure, probably a church. He was able to sketch the outlines of the church, sacristy, and campo santo, and even to recognize a structure at the west end of the church, in the area he identified as the apse, that later turned out to be the altar. [98]

Howard requested that the Park Service plan to excavate the church. In response, Stanley Stubbs of the Laboratory of Anthropology of the Museum of New Mexico visited the site. He decided that Boundey and Howard had been correct: there was indeed a church in the plaza of Pueblo Blanco. Stubbs arranged a permit with the Department of Agriculture for excavation in Cibola National Forest, where the site was located, and began digging on June 8, 1959, with Howard assisting. The field work was completed on June 14, and Stubbs published the results in El Palacio. [99] In April, 1960, Howard published a historical assessment of the site, offering documentary evidence that the church must logically be that of San Diego de Tabirá. This has since been accepted, and the ruins of Pueblo Blanco are now also called "Tabirá." [100]

The results of Stubb's excavations have been reevaluated in the present report, in light of the revised sequence of construction events at Las Humanas in 1629-32, 1634-36, and 1659-61, presented in chapters 6 and 10. The structural events imply that the three episodes of construction Stubbs identified at San Diego de Tabirá should be: 1) the construction of the foundations and the first two or three feet of wall by Fray Francisco Letrado in 1630-31, during which Letrado built no internal structures such as altars; 2) completion of the church in 1634-36 by Fray Francisco de Acevedo, including the first altar; and 3) the renovation of the building in 1660-61 or later by Fray Diego de Santandér or his successors. This is hypothetical, of course, and may be revised as more archeological or documentary information becomes available. For example, it is quite possible that Acevedo could have carried out the construction of both versions of the complete church, first in 1634-36 and then during the "resurgence" of the 1650s.