Forcing emacs to not use 256 colors

[Tom Noonan II]

Good day:

I'm a long time emacs user and I'm used to the default 16 color syntax
highlighting.  I recently upgraded my system which brought in 256 color
support, and I find the new syntax highlighting colors distasteful.  I
also dislike how the colors may be completely different depending on if
I'm using a 16 color terminal or a 256 color terminal.  I'd like to
force emacs to only use 16 color or less palettes.

I took a look at M-x customize-themes but that doesn't look like what I
want.  That appears to be changing the overall theme, including
foreground and background colors.  I want to force the default, non
-256color behavior everywhere, not change the overall coloring.

I tried searching but the results are getting flooded out with posts on
how to enable 256 colors.  Is there a way to disable these 256color
specific syntax highlighting pallettes?  Or otherwise limit the color
mapping to the various $TERM values?

--Tom Noonan II