Cattle Ranching on the Northeastern Border of New Spain: Colonial Foodways at Mission Dolores, Texas

Abstract Colonial borderlands provide an opportunity to study innovation of new foodways and persistence of traditional ones amid unfamiliar and potentially risky environments and dynamic cultural contexts. Archaeological research in northern New Spain has revealed foodways diversity as Spaniards attempted to replicate agropastoral systems and Indigenous peoples incorporated, to varying extents, new plants and animals into their culinary practices. These processes remain relatively unknown in Spanish Tejas. Here we present new zooarchaeological data from Mission Dolores in eastern Texas, synthesizing these data with a review of other Tejas missions and presidios. Written records indicate that Mission Dolores occupants struggled to provision themselves and to convert Indigenous Ais but had trade relations with neighboring French. We investigate the nature of the food system, the likelihood of self-provisioning, and culinary processing. We show that cattle were the dominant meat source, and wild fauna were rarely consumed. Mortality profiles indicate slaughter of prime age animals, while skeletal part representation, and three-dimensional visualizations of cut marks, indicate butchery of whole carcasses on site. Our findings contrast with documents implying resource stress at Mission Dolores and unexpectedly show that Mission Dolores occupants were almost solely reliant on ranching, compared with other Tejas missions and presidios.