The War of Images in Colonial New Mexico

In this article, I consider the war of images that unfolded in New Mexico during the 18th and 19th centuries, as that war can be retrospectively glimpsed in what archaeologists refer to as the Plains Biographic Tradition of rock art. I argue that the Biographic Tradition originated in New Mexico during a volatile period of cultural exchange at the beginning of the 18th century, when Native groups such as the Comanche and Apache swept into the Rio Grande valley to raid and trade, leaving not just with horses and captives but also with appropriated European images and aesthetic conventions. I suggest that the rise of the Biographic Tradition involved a fundamental reworking of what an image was, resulting in an intimate connection between figuration and warfare that rapidly expanded to Indigenous communities across a wide swath of the American West.