Ceramic Production in Early Hispanic California: Craft, Economy, and Trade on the Frontier of New Spain

“One of the most authoritative and comprehensive analyses written to date on lifestyle, technology, identity, and economic interaction in a Spanish colony.”—Wesley D. Stoner, Archaeometry Laboratory at the University of Missouri Research Reactor

“A benchmark publication. Extensively investigating mission- and presidio-associated ceramics, this book unearths the history of California as a remote area of New Spain that became integrated into a larger world system.”—Patricia Fournier, National Institute of Anthropology and History, Mexico

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, much of what is now the western United States was known as Alta California, a distant corner of New Spain. The presidios, missions, and pueblos of the region have yielded a rich trove of ceramics materials, though they have been sparsely analyzed in the literature. Ceramic Production in Early Hispanic California examines those materials to reinterpret the economic position of Alta California in the Spanish Colonial Empire.

Using neutron activation analysis, petrography, and other analytic procedures, thousands of ceramic samples were examined. The contributors to this volume explore the region’s ceramic production, imports, trade, and consumption. From artistic innovation to technological diffusion, a different aspect of the intricacies of everyday life and culture in the region is revealed in each essay. This book illuminates much about Spanish imperial expansion in a far corner of the colonial world. Through this research, California history has been rewritten.