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Ethnohistory 47.3-4 (2000) 821-823



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Book Review

Arqueología, antropología e historia en los Andes:
Homenaje a María Rostworowski


Arqueología, antropología e historia en los Andes: Homenaje a María Rostworowski. Edited by Rafael Varón Gabai and Javier Flores Espinosa. (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and Banco Central de Reserva del Perú, 1997. 813 pp., preface, introduction, interview with María Rostworowski, her bibliographies, frontispiece.)

This monumental homage to the great autodidact ethnohistorian of Peru, compiled in honor of her eightieth birthday, consists of some thirty-nine articles plus a comprehensive bibliography of María Rostworowski’s work, an introduction discussing the importance of her work over the decades, and a chatty interview with the honoree in which the interviewers lead Rostworowski to discuss, with candor and vivacity, her life and how she was led into ethnohistory. The interview provides highlights of her long life and encounters with many of the great historians and archaeologists of the century. The articles are arranged under six separate themes: “Sources and Heuristic Problems,” “Technology and Natural Resources,” “The Incas,” “Regional and Local Studies,” “Ideology,” and “Theoretical and Methodological Proposals”—themes that reflect the immense spread of Rostworowski’s interests and research. The theoretical, methodological, and topical range of articles authored by a veritable who’s who of Andean studies ranges from a discussion of arsenic bronze during the Middle Horizon by Heather Lechtman to an interesting ethnographic study on what it means to be an evangelical Christian in the tiny rural Catholic (with a strong trace of pre-Columbian practices) town of Tucumé by Luis Millones and Rubén Millones. As might be expected in a book dedicated to a person whose major contributions have been in ethnohistory, more than two-thirds of the articles are concerned with aspects of Andean ethnohistory or the interface of history and archaeology. [End Page 821]

Of the archaeological articles, that of Elias Mujica is especially interesting. He presents evidence for a permanent occupation of the central coast lomas (seasonal xerophytic fog-watered forests) in late pre-Hispanic times, challenging the common idea that all use of this ecosystem was seasonal. In the same vein, Duccio Bonavia and Carlos Monge suggest that the importance of the high-altitude zone in the Andes has likewise been misinterpreted and misunderstood. This article is mainly a useful abstract of Bonavia’s monumental work on the American camelids, with emphasis on understanding that the llama is a creature of the Andean slopes, not solely of the upper altitudes.

A number of essays derive from work related to the famous Huarochirí manuscript. Of these Pierre Duviols’s short discussion of where the sanctuary of the Pariacaca, one of the great deities of Huarochirí, might be found is most informative in delineating what research is necessary to identify the sanctuary or sanctuaries of this paramount deity. Frank Salomon presents the first stage of his ethnographic and historic work in the province of Huarochirí, discussing quipus in Tupicocha and their ritual use to symbolize the continuity and legitimacy of the ayllus. The quipus in question cannot be read, and Salomon presents several interesting hypotheses concerning their contents. Among the Inca essays, that by John Howland Rowe on the lands that belonged to various Inca rulers stands out, presenting new documents concerning the lands owned by individual rulers, an important means of understanding non-Western imperial economics.

Jorge Flores Ochoa’s essay on the “missa” takes this concept from a curandero’s display of power objects through to the essential duality of Andean thought, linking the concept to bicolored corn, bicolored llamas, and then to the decoration on pre-Columbian Inca ceramics and textiles, linking present ideas with ones far more ancient. Marco Curtola returns to one of Rostworowski’s works on pre-Columbian traders in the Chincha Valley, suggesting that Chincha wealth was built on trading guano by way of llama caravans to other Andean polities. Susan E. Ramírez strongly critiques the trading hypothesis, pointing out that “trading” in a Western sense was not...

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