The archaeology of El Presidio de San Francisco: Culture contact, gender, and ethnicity in a Spanish-colonial military community (California)

This dissertation is an archaeological and historical study of culture contact and social identity at El Presidio de San Francisco, a Spanish-colonial military settlement founded in California in 1776. Simultaneously a fort and a village, El Presidio de San Francisco was the home and workplace of a diverse population of men, women, and children, including Mesoamerican Indian, African, and mixed-heritage military settlers from the provinces of northwest Mexico; Native Californians displaced by colonization; and travelers and traders from Western Europe, Russia, and the United States. The cultures and lifeways of these diverse peoples and their descendants were irrevocably transformed by colonization and by their encounters with each other.; The research presented here investigates these cultural transformations through archaeological survey and excavations, laboratory studies, and archival research. My investigations bring together five bodies of data: (1) archival records of the gender, ethnic, racial, and age composition of the settlement; (2) archaeological and documentary evidence of architectural practices in the presidio's main quadrangle; (3) survey data that reveal patterns of indigenous and colonial landscape practices; (4) evidence of household practices acquired through excavations of residential contexts; and (5) ceramics, material culture, and dietary remains recovered from a midden deposit. These inquiries into the conditions of daily life at the settlement provide the empirical foundation for a rich historical reconstruction of cultural practices at El Presidio de San Francisco.; In my analyses, I focus on the recursive relationship between material practices and changing social identities to reveal the shifting fault lines of colonial and indigenous societies during this era of rapid cultural change. The colonial population at El Presidio de San Francisco used material culture and spatial practices to reconstitute their social identities, adopting a new Californio identity that repudiated the ethnic/racial distinctions associated with the Spanish sistema de castas. This process of ethnogenesis was created and sustained through increasing homogenization of material practices, through distinction from California's indigenous peoples, and through increased rigidity in gender roles and sexual mores. By engendering the history of colonial military settlements, this dissertation brings forward a synergistic interplay among archaeological theories of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.