conducted research on sites of every major cultural time period in New Mexico and served as the Albuquerque City Archaeologist for ten years. He is currently an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.
Schmader applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Uncovering America's First War: Contact, Conflict, and Coronado's Expedition to the Rio Grande, and reported the following:
My page 99 is actually very important but is on a topic not quite within the main theme of the book. The best quote is: “The scale and pace of other changes (such as architecture and settlement patterns) in the late pre-Contact era of the middle Rio Grande pueblos is paralleled in the ceramic record.” Here I describe that the Ancestral Pueblo world was going through substantial and systemic change in the century or less before the arrival of the first Europeans and outsiders in 1540. This was quite consequential, because those changes in fact helped strengthen pre-Contact Pueblo social organizations to a degree that helped it withstand a major impact from the outside. Without these changes, the Pueblos may have been less resilient to great external stresses.Learn more about Uncovering America's First War at the University of New Mexico Press website.
The main storyline of the book is about the collision between the world’s greatest superpower at the time—the burgeoning Spanish empire—and the most populated area of the American Southwest, which was located in the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico. The book details material signs of conflict, of battles fought between not only Europeans and Pueblos, but also involving hundreds of Mexican Native soldiers brought to bolster the European ranks. The stand-off was epic, a life and death struggle for the very survival of Indigenous cultures versus the forces of European expansionism. The Ancestral Pueblos succeeded where other societies went extinct, and the Europeans came up empty in their quest to find Asia. What emerged instead is a blend of cultures unique to the American Southwest, with syncretism in religion, intermarriage, and unique lifeways. It was a painful birthing process, marked by constant Indigenous resistance and by Spanish determination to establish some sort of colony. As often happens in history, nobody got everything they sought and the outcome produced unexpected results—in this case, New Mexican culture.
--Marshal Zeringue
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