Anita,

You of all people should be careful who you call a liar. This is inflamatory
and unprofessional. It has done nothing to advance our understanding of the
use of the term colonoware in archaeology.

There is ample evidence that not all local native people willingly leave
their villages or base camps to become Roman Catholics at the Spanish missions in
18th and early 19th century California. If they were not enslaved, why were
the doors to the dormitories locked? There were 4,000 bodies buried in the
Mission San Diego cemetery between 1774 and 1834, which seems like a heck of a lot
of people to volunteer their lives for a Spanish king and Christianity. Since
I truly believe the Spanish system was intended to break down native
settlement and cultural systems and coerce native people to change their lifestyle to
adopt Spanish culture and rules of behavior and that many of those people
objected to being corraled into the missions, I did not lie. Lying is when you say
something you do not believe to be true.

Furthermore, I am neither anti-Roman Catholic nor anti-Spanish. My statement
that I think the use of native people against their will was enslavement has
nothing to do with my feelings about the mission or presidio system Spain
employed in California. You can disagree but that does not make me a liar.

Finally, when a European nation lands ships and armies on a foreign soil and
sends military expeditions overland to conquer pagans in the name of the King
of Spain and an order of the Roman Catholic Church, I would call that an
invasion. Sure, it was not D-Day, but the system was intended to take land they had
no title to, round up native people for forced labor, and set up a military
system to enforce it.

My point is that the stress of culture clash and the need for cheap plentiful
pottery at Spanish communities resulted in a wide variety of technologies
applied to making terracott pottery. The term used in the east, "Colonoware" does
not apply to Califirnia. That is my opinion and it is based on over 35 years
of work with California pottery and historic mission period sites.

Ron May
Legacy 106, Inc.