What Coronado Saw, Didn’t See, or Just Imagined: Implications for Understanding the Southern Plains Borderlands

with Dr. Stephen M. Perkins

April 23, 2026 4 PM CT

 

Beginning in the early 1400s, Native peoples with extraordinarily different histories and cultures converged on the Southern High Plains Borderlands. Their shared desire for bison products, agricultural goods and other resources resulted in complex social and economic relations between New Mexico’s Pueblo peoples; nomadic, bison-hunting ancestral Apache peoples of the Texas Panhandle; and ancestral Caddoan peoples occupying northwestern Texas and Oklahoma. Led by a Caddoan guide encountered at Pecos pueblo, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his Spanish conquistadores entered the Southern Plains Borderlands in the spring of 1541 eventually providing the first written accounts of the disparate peoples encountered. As will be discussed, 485 years later archaeologists and historians continue to ponder the “who, what, and where” of those Indigenous peoples encountered by Coronado, and how best to conceptualize and explain this landscape.

 

Stephen M. Perkins Is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Sociology Department at OSU. Perkins earned a PhD in the Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University. His research centers on North American archaeology and ethnohistorical investigations of Indigenous societies. His teaching focuses on undergraduate education. Additionally, Perkins remains committed to the public dissemination of his research for the benefit of nonspecialist audiences. He taught a leisure learning class at the DRC in July 2025.