Beyond the Church

Fronting virtually every church was the campo santo. Enclosed by a wall about five feet high, it distinguished the church zone from the wilderness or the remainder of the village and acted as a transition between the secular world and the consecrated church. Burial within the campo santo was the normal practice, although in many churches today only one cross, more or less centrally positioned, serves as a collective remembrance of those interred. At Laguna and Picuris the ruddy background renders the single white cross a powerful icon but only hints at its role as a grave marker. The remainder of the ground is earthen, swept clean. The actual burial ground at Las Trampas lies to the right of the church and occupies only a small part of the sanctified zone within the outer walls and those of the church of San José. The importance granted the campo santo is most clearly illustrated by Acoma, where the density of the rock permitted no burials. A massive retaining wall of stone was required, and constructing and filling the burial ground itself took decades. The multitude of simply marked graves within the walls today attests to the spirit and determination of the congregation.

Charles Lange reported that by the late 1960s the original campo santo at Cochiti had been filled, and a new burial ground was opened west of the church. Unlike the original campo santo, where "the sexes were segregated, with the males south of the midline and the females north, duplicating their normal division within the church during Mass," no segregation of sexes characterized the new century, although the graves continued to be arranged in north-south rows.^[100]

The sedentary nature of the Pueblo communities—in contrast to the scattered or seminomadic peoples of central Mexico—permitted a more accurate census by the Spanish and a church structure more in accord with the size and stability of the settlement. As a result, the use of the atrio, designed to accommodate fluctuating populations and sudden conversions, was probably not widespread in New Mexico. In several churches, however, parts of the mission complex were assigned only hypothetical functions because of the generic nature of colonial construction and lack of documentation. Whether these open rooms adjacent to or near the entrance of the church were used as a porter's lodge or as a site for exterior religious services is still open to question. An early photograph of San Ildefonso showed one of these covered shelters, which Kubler suggested might have served as a chapel.^[101] John McAndrew thought otherwise:

Echoes have been seen in the eighteenth century porterías of the missions of New Mexico, a recently converted frontier region in some ways equivalent to the frontiers of the time of the Great Conversion; but inasmuch as most of these porterías have a doorway in the middle of the back wall where the altar would have to be and a built-in adobe bench all around the walls, and as there are no notices of altars or of any use of chapels, it seems unjustified to accept them as chapels.^[102]

Joseph Toulouse, however, was certain that a "small shrine" on the south side of the Abo church was a chapel: "This is undoubtedly a posa or courtyard chapel which is found in Mexican sixteenth-century churches." He was basing his opinion only on sub-surface archeological evidence rather than on an extant structure, however.^[103]