Contested Territory

Contents

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1. Landscape and the Spanish Conquest of Peru

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pp. 1-16

In 1527, about five years before the conquest of Peru began in earnest, a small band of Spaniards, sailing southward along the Pacific coast in the vicinity of the equator, captured an indigenous seagoing raft bearing trade goods that included, among other things, emeralds and fine textiles. Described in the Relaci�n Samano-Xerez, a brief report of uncertain ...

2. Beyond Textuality: Landscape, Embodiment, and Native Agency

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pp. 17-48

In May 1532 a small group of Spaniards disembarked at the port of T�mbez, in the far northwestern reaches of the Inca empire, known to its native inhabitants as Tawantinsuyu. Of the men who came ashore, some had been newly recruited in Spain by their leader, Francisco Pizarro, but most had come from Central America, where they left behind ...

3. Landscapes of Resistance?: Peru’s Relaciones Geográficas

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pp. 49-74

In the late sixteenth century, fifty-point geographical questionnaires, designed by the Council of the Indies’ chief chronicler and cosmographer, López de Velasco, were sent to colonial officials throughout Peru and other parts of the New World, along with instructions on how to complete them. Described by Mignolo as “one of the most impressive...

4. The Mobile Landscapes of Huarochiri

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pp. 75-108

By the latter half of the sixteenth century, the turbulence of the initial period of conquest and ensuing civil conflicts in Peru had begun to subside, giving way to a new and, in many ways, more grounded colonial society. By the 1570s the age of large-scale expeditions of exploration and conquest that forcibly uprooted thousands of indigenous people, ...

5. Negotiating Amazonia: The Accounts of Juan Recio de Le�n

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pp. 109-132

The first foundations of Spanish control had barely been established in the Peruvian highlands when new expeditions of conquest headed eastward toward the Amazon frontier. Propelled by the spectacular success of the Peruvian campaigns and by rumors of wealthy polities beyond the Andes, wave after wave of would-be conquistadors left Quito, ...

6. Contested Frontiers and the Amazon/Andes Divide

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pp. 133-159

A curious paradox marks Inca and Spanish relations with the tropical low lands. The Spaniards—unlike the rulers of Tawantinsuyu, for whom a concept of opposition between Andes and Amazon was fundamental to their sense of identity—did not generally articulate such a binary at the time of their arrival in Peru, nor, like the Incas, did they regard the ...

Conclusion. Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

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pp. 159-166

Between the 1520s, when the first Spaniards tentatively set foot in the northern extremities of the Inca empire, and the final third of the seventeenth century, the human and physical landscapes of what was administered as the Viceroyalty of Peru underwent significant and in some respects dramatic and irreversible changes. In a very material sense, ...

Glossary

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pp. 167-169

Notes

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pp. 170-213

Bibliography

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pp. 214-248

Index

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pp. 249-256