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

1: Colonialism in the Andes: An Emplaced Perspective

1 COLONIALISM IN THE ANDES An Emplaced Perspective In the short span of just a few generations, the peoples of the Andean region of South America engaged the colonial projects of two imperial powers— Tawantinsuyu (the Inka “Fourfold Domain”) and the Kingdom of Spain— each bent on extracting their wealth and reshaping their societies according to their own ideal self-images. Andean communities were serially colonized and exploited, as labor, land, and produce were expropriated by these conquest states. But in the everyday interactions and enduring features of landscape and the built environment that constituted the ongoing conditions of life under Inka and Spanish rule, colonizing ideologies,institutions,andpractices were also transformed and made to articulate with a great diversity of Andean cultural postulates and practices. In their colonization of the Andes, the Inka and Spanish states were also colonized. Inthisbook,Icontendthatcommunityandlandscapeconstitutedprimary sociocultural interfaces through which such mutually constitutive processes of colonization occurred. It examines how it occurred through an emplaced archaeological and ethnohistorical study of how particular Andean communities experienced, adapted to, and transformed successive colonial projects by the Inka and Spanish states. By an emplaced study, I mean a detailed, in situ, empirical rendering of the historical and material ramifications of social practice over varied temporal and spatial scales. It adopts a holistic methodological approach, integrating a range of archaeological and documentary data in a common spatial framework using geographic information systems (GIS) as a central analytical toolset. The chronological scope of the study spans the 500 years between the twelfth and early seventeenth centuries. It beginsbytrackingthedevelopmentoftwomajorlateprehispanicethnicpolities —the Collaguas and Cabanas—in the Colca Valley of southern highland Peru and then investigates how their incorporation into the Inka and Spanish 2 Negotiated Settlements empires was related to the reproduction and transformation of community organization, land-use practices, and the physical configuration of the landscape and built environments of local settlements. The Colca Valley (Figure 1.1) is an ideal context in which to carry out such a project. On the eve of the Spanish invasion, the valley landscape had already been transformed by some 400 years of autonomous rule, followed by about a century of Inka imperial administration. This history is manifested Figure 1.1. Regional map of the Colca Valley, showing provincial subdivisions and their approximate boundaries. Colonialism in the Andes: An Emplaced Perspective 3 in the built forms that today make up a spectacular mosaic of anthropogenic landforms, irrigation systems, well-preserved settlements, cemeteries, fortifications , and other archaeological sites (e.g., Figure 1.2). This book traces the construction of that landscape and the occupations of the peoples who built and dwelled in it through a spatial synthesis of archaeological and ethnohistorical data sources. The archaeological component centers on two primary elements: (1) a systematic survey that I conducted in the political nucleus of the Collagua ethnic group, an area surrounding the later Inkaic and colonial provincial capital of Yanque and the neighboring village of Coporaque in the central part of the Colca Valley, and (2) excavations at the site of Malata, a small Inka outpost in the upper reaches of the valley that was transformed into a Franciscan doctrina (doctrinal settlement) during the first generation after the Spanish invasion and subsequently abandoned with the establishment of colonial planned towns—reducciones—in the 1570s. Appropriate to Figure 1.2. Agricultural terracing surrounds the settlement of Uyu Uyu (site YA-050). (Source: 1931 Shippee-Johnson aerial expedition, Image 334671, Special Collections, American Museum of Natural History Library.) 4 Negotiated Settlements the study of Andean community organization and the excellent architectural preservation of late prehispanic sites in the Colca Valley, I designed the survey to collect data of intermediate resolution—more detailed than a regional survey but broader in scope than a site-specific survey or excavation. Also, unlike most archaeological surveys in the Andes, I did not truncate data collection at the point of Spanish invasion; this permits a more seamless view of the transition from Inkaic to Spanish rule up to the forced resettlement of the local populace from their prehispanic settlements into European-style reducci ón villages in the 1570s. The ethnohistorical component uses detailed Spanish colonial visitas (administrative surveys) from an area overlapping with the archaeological survey to reconstruct how ayllus (named, ancestor-focused, resource-holding kindreds) structured regional- and local-scale land-use patterns. The core innovation of the approach presented below lies in its detailed reconstruction of ayllu land-tenure...