Illuminating an unseen history
It sounds like a story nearly all elementary schoolchildren can tell: A group of colonists, many of them simple farmers fed up with being unfairly taxed and ruled by a sovereign thousands of miles away, rises up against their colonizers, earning the right to rule themselves. It may sound like the American Revolution, but this story takes place almost a century before the first shots were fired at the battles of Lexington and Concord. As told in “Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico,” a new book by Assistant Professor of Anthropology Matthew Liebmann, it’s the story of the Pueblo Revolt, the most renowned colonial uprising in the history of the American Southwest. Unlike most histories of the revolt, which typically focus only on the colonial period just before the uprising and the Spanish return to the region a dozen years later, Liebmann’s book offers a...