Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua

Preface

xv Preface Since the early 1990s I’ve fretted about not meeting my responsibilities for full and timely publication of the data from the Moquegua Bodegas Project. I can trot out the usual excuses: increasing administrative duties, a return to fieldwork in the Maya area, supervision of graduate students, and so on. In 2009, however, with the good fortune of both a sabbatical leave and growing interest in historical archaeology in the Andes, I was able to synthesize the findings of the Moquegua Bodegas Project into a monograph entitled Vintage Moquegua: History, Wine, and Archaeology on a Peruvian Periphery (Rice 2011b). Vintage Moquegua is a history of the introduction of wine-based agrarian capitalism into this tiny valley on the periphery of the European world system. But because of limits on the length of the volume , I was unable to include raw data from project excavations, especially at Locumbilla, the most intensively investigated winery site, and at the congregación site of Torata Alta. So I began writing half a dozen articles presenting these data and interpretations. While developing these analyses, however, I grew increasingly frustrated with the sclerotic processes of peer review and publication in scholarly journals and the need for repetition of basic background information in each manuscript: field operations, Moquegua’s environment, various maps, references, and so on. Mindful of a frequent critique of academicians—that we publish the same information over and over, but in different journals—as well as the waste of trees in devoting repeated pages to the same information (even in this electronic world),I concluded that the most appropriate solution to both dilemmas was to bring everything together in a single volume. PREFACE xvi The sense of “unfinished business” had another component. After leading a graduate seminar on “Space and Place” focused on the Maya, I grew more interested in the production of space in settings of in-migration and colonization . I was particularly concerned with the “espacio Moqueguano” as part of what Carlos Sempat Assadourian (1972) calls the “espacio Peruano.” Specifically, I wanted to explore what Moquegua’s experience might tell us about landscape, space, and place and their meanings and orderings in colonial encounters, as well as what the orderings and meanings of landscape, space, and place—the spatializations—in such encounters might tell us about Moquegua. I drafted a paper about some of my ideas and asked the seminar participants to read it, and one student responded that she thought it contained too many ideas for a single article. So I decided to prepare the present book, the completion of which has been greatly furthered by my retirement from academia. With respect to the meanings of spaces and places, I am intrigued by the observation that “places come into being through praxis . . . places produce meaning . . . [and] control over the meanings of place [should be returned] to the rightful producers” of it (Rodman 1992: 642, 643, 644). One way to investigate the processes of colonialism and layering of spatial meanings is through toponyms: their linguistic sources (i.e.,the colonized or the colonizers) and patterns of retention, loss, and renaming. In the Moquegua landscape, for example, some ancient indigenous toponyms were lost,and others were appropriated into the Spanish-colonial wine-based political economy.I also look at the spaces and spatializations embodied in tin-enameled (“majolica”) pottery: this beautiful ware has a history of more than a millennium that spans the globe. The details of its production—especially the colorful decoration carefully painted onto its surface spaces—its trade, and its use provide insights into cultural interactions not otherwise easily obtained. The result of my explorations is the present volume, a compilation of essays about various aspects of the history and archaeology of Moquegua from the perspective of spaces and their ordering. This volume lacks the narrative arc of Vintage Moquegua because it treats disparate topics that are not strictly organized chronologically, although they are thematically linked. The focus is primarily on a “moment” in Moquegua’s history: Spanish contact, which appears to have begun around AD 1534–35. Archaeologically (and even historically), of course, it is impossible to define this literally as a single moment in clock-time or calendar-time. Indeed, to try to do so would be a pointless exercise: Spanish contacts with, and colonization of, the valley occurred over several decades, and Moquegua’s initial experience with the Europeans was significantly contoured by its incorporation into the Inka empire little more than a half century...