Negotiated Settlements: Andean Communities and Landscapes under Inka and Spanish Colonialism

7: The Ayllu Interface

7 THE AYLLU INTERFACE By taking a trans-conquest perspective, the previous two chapters allowed us toseethecommonprocessesinvolvedinhowlocalcommunitiesengagedsuccessive Inkaic and Spanish colonial projects aimed at refashioning Collagua society according to ideal images of order and hierarchy. In both cases, new kinds of communities emerged as colonial projects were met by the material and practical dimensions of local landscapes and communities: Even as they were subsumed by colonial projects, they transformed them. The previous chapter explored how hybrid Collagua/Inka community structures continued to articulate regional-scale patterns of agricultural and pastoral production , exchange, and consumption during Inkaic and early colonial times. This chapter brings a complementary, local view of ayllu- and moiety-level land-use patterns through time, first by presenting a detailed reconstruction of early colonial-era land-tenure patterns of local ayllus and then by using that reconstruction to retrodict the residence patterns of ayllus under Inka rule. Focusing on the reducción of Coporaque and its surrounding landscapes, this analysis will show specifically how it was that Inka administration at once grafted onto the dualistic structures of local land use and community organization and attempted to overwrite them by introducing and distributing the fields and residences of state-ordered ayllus across the autochthonous dualistic divide. It will also put the emplacement of the reducción of Coporaque in a new light. Though situated in a location that was virtually unoccupied, Coporaque can be seen not as an erasure of prehispanic patterns of land use and residence but as quite literally a “negotiated settlement” whose emplacement balanced the interests of its ranked dualistic communities and their vested interests in the surrounding landscape. Even so, the legacy of reducción—the incongruous arrangement of a nucleated colonial town in the midst of a vast dispersion of small terraces and their supporting irrigation infrastructures— was not without significant deleterious effects for its constituent households, ayllus, and their supporting agricultural systems. The last section explores 252 Negotiated Settlements the factors that account for the degradation of the Coporaque landscape— in part a legacy of colonial settlement consolidation—through a GIS-based walking model comparing the patterning of fields that continue to be cultivated today compared to those that were abandoned during historic times. Reconstructing Ayllu Land-Use and Residential Patterns: A Reverse Site-Catchment Approach The analysis in this chapter is based on locating landholding declarations in the Colca Valley visitas by matching the toponyms used to locate agricultural fields in the visita declarations with their modern toponymic counterparts. Household landholding declarations in the visitas included the size of each field, the predominant crop grown in it, and the location of the field by reference to a toponym. Coporaque is the best locale to carry out this analysis because it overlaps with the archaeological survey area, it is among the best documented villages in the visitas, and its modern toponyms are the most intensively studied in the valley. The social and spatial resolution of the reconstruction is also important: Visita declarations can be scaled down to the household level or aggregated up in scale through the ayllu, moiety, and village levels. To my knowledge, this is the most detailed reconstruction of colonial land-use patterns to be achieved in the Andes. I use two visitas to provide acomplete viewofbothmoietiesinCoporaque:the1604visitaofYanquecollaguas Urinsaya and the 1615–17 visita of Yanquecollaguas Hanansaya.1 To reconstruct pre-reducción ayllu residence patterns from their landtenure patterns, I employ what I call a “reverse site-catchment” approach. While traditional site-catchment analysis simulates land-use catchment areas around known site locations (Roper 1979; Vita-Finzi and Higgs 1970), this methodology does the reverse: It retrodicts prehistoric residence patterns from historically documented land-use data by comparing the land-tenure patterns of local ayllus with the settlement locations registered in the archaeological survey. Though prehistoric Andean land-use patterns are dispersed, this method assumes that there was still a generally inverse relationship between extent and/or intensity of cultivation and distance from settlement. Thus point-pattern analysis showing clustering of agricultural field distributions in relation to prehispanic settlements are taken to reflect echoes of residential patterns prior to resettlement. This inference is reasonable when considering that the visitas in question wererecorded just one to two generations after resettlement and thus, through inheritance, historically documented land-tenure patterns ought to reflect echoes of prehispanic antecedents. This approach can therefore show how the dispersed landholding constellations The Ayllu...