Dr. Stacie KingAssociate Professor of AnthropologyAssociate Faculty for the Center forLatin American and Caribbean StudiesIndiana University BloomingtonAbstract:This talk explores the challenges that ethnonyms create when trying to reconstructhistories of multiethnic landscapes in the ancient world. My larger project in the Nejaparegion of Oaxaca, Mexico addresses various aspects of conquest and colonialism alonginteregional trade routes, including identifying fortresses in mountain landscapes, themeaning of unoccupied land, the relationships entailed by trade and exchange, andreconciling archival documents, oral history, and archaeology. In this talk, I use my workto demonstrate how ethnonyms have pervaded interpretations of the past, archaeologicalreconstructions, and Colonial period registers, such that it remains difficult to envision adifferent kind of thriving, multiethnic world. Taken together, archaeological data, archivalinformation, and oral history from rural multiethnic Nejapa, Oaxaca show us thatdifferent indigenous communities across this landscape experienced Aztec, Zapotec, andSpanish conquests and colonialisms differently between the years A.D. 1350 and 1650, andthat these differences do not fit well with traditional reconstructions of Nejapa’sindigenous ethnic groups (Mixe, Chontal, and Zapotec). Instead, the data complicateentrenched notions of ethnicity and challenge their basic formulation. The long-standingmultiethnic past of ancient Nejapa set the stage for a different form of indigeneity thatNejapa’s resident experience in the present.