The Spanish conquest of New Mexico was even more brutal than has been depicted in history, a Stanford University anthropologist says in a new book.

"With heathens and infidels, it was illegal to shed their blood, so you had to figure out another way to kill them," Michael Wilcox said in an interview Thursday. "You could hang them, which happened, or you could burn them, burn them at the stake."

The assistant professor of anthropology at Stanford lays out his arguments in The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest, published by the University of California Press.

Since the 1880s, historians have downplayed the "Black Legend" of Spanish atrocities as anti-Hispanic, but Wilcox's book documents horrific violence in the colonial Southwest.

Juan de Oñate's order to sever a foot from each young warrior of Acoma Pueblo in retribution for its resistance is well known in New Mexico. Less known is Francisco Vazquez de Coronado's massacre at Moho, a Pueblo village believed to have been near today's Albuquerque.

Wilcox said Coronado's soldiers and allies from several Indian tribes — including Tlaxcaltecans from central Mexico who settled in Santa Fe's Barrio de Analco around San Miguel Chapel — laid siege to Moho for weeks during the winter, cut off the water supplies and waited for its people to surrender.

"It's a sad story. It breaks your heart," he said. "The Rio Grande is frozen over, so in the middle of the night, they decide to send the women and children out to escape. They run across river, the warriors follow, and they're all cut down and slaughtered. The Spanish say they got everybody."

Wilcox said he also turned up accounts of Spanish soldiers in today's Mexican state of Zacatecas "stuffing the bodies of Indian people into cannons and blowing them into the sky to frighten the Indian people."

"This governor is witnessing this and says, 'Look, this provoking-the-Indians thing was a good way to get people to work in the mines in the beginning, but now it's just become a disaster,' " he said. "They're very frightened about how little control they have in northern Mexico. It's an out-of-control frontier, and the Pueblo Revolt is only one of maybe four or five other rebellions that happened in the north."

Wilcox, 42, grew up in California's Bay Area, but his father's family was Yuman from the Arizona/California border. He said he became interested in the Pueblo Revolt after hearing a presentation by former Cochiti Pueblo Gov. Henry Joseph Suina a decade ago.

Spaniards who followed Coronado's initial expedition into the Southwest in 1540-41 often found many Pueblo villages abandoned, and since the 1940s historians have speculated this was due to decimation by disease. Popular culture sometimes depicts the Indians as being so awed by the Europeans that they ran away — what Wilcox calls the "ooga-booga syndrome."

But Wilcox said Spanish documents and archaeological evidence indicate the Pueblos were used to living among people far different than themselves, knew about Spanish brutality and often avoided them by leaving their main villages to live temporarily in remote pueblos, then returning to foment rebellion.

The ruins of these "post-contact, non-mission" villages dot the Jemez Mountains, often near the better-known Indian settlements, he said. San José Mission near Jemez Springs was burned or demolished by natives at least three times before 1680, indicating the Spanish had a tenuous grip on New Mexico's remote areas.

"If every time they left to go back to Santa Fe the thing was ripped apart brick by brick, you're really not doing a great job of converting people," Wilcox said.

Although the Roman Catholic Church allowed Africans to be enslaved because they were presumed to have rejected Christianity, it forbade enslaving Indians because they were believed never to have heard of Christ. Nevertheless, the Spanish were allowed to enslave Indians who attacked them.

Wilcox said Spanish conquistadors, who needed quick profits to pay for their positions, often accused the Pueblos of attacking them so they could acquire slaves to work the silver mines in Mexico, textile mills in Santa Fe and agricultural fields all over — leading to many Indian deaths from starvation, overwork and accidents.

After the Spanish returned to New Mexico in 1692, they continued the violence by blaming their intermediaries — called coyotes — for causing the rebellion of 1680 by incorrectly translating the Christian message.

But despite the violence, Wilcox said, Native Americans may have fared better in the Spanish colonies of the West than in the English colonies of the East.

"The Spanish are blamed for being bloodthirsty and especially violent," he said. "What they're really guilty of is writing down what they did. In the East, where colonization was accomplished by the first limited liability corporations, they don't have to debate the morality of what they're doing. They have closed books. ...

"The Spanish are very worried about the tactics they use, so they debate them and they write about them and they struggle with them and they're very concerned with the morality of what they're doing."

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.