Collaguas II. Lari Collaguas, Economia, Sociedad y Poblacion, 1604-1605 (review)

The second subtitle for this work is Homenaje a Franklin Pease G. Y. I was fortunate enough to count Franklin as one of my best friends in Peru for almost two decades, and thus I am especially delighted to review this book, a publication that would have pleased him very much. Incidentally, the II in the title alludes to the text, Collaguas I, that Franklin edited in 1977, which focused on a late 16th Century "visita" (Spanish census) of the Lari area in the middle Colca Valley (southern highlands of Peru). The present volume is a transcription and analysis of a later visita to the same region.

The book is divided into three distinct parts. First, demographic historian Noble David Cook provides an introduction that places the 1604-05 visita into a historical framework and briefly reviews Pease's career. Next, geographer David Robinson examines the problems with the transcription, reviews the history of the document, and analyzes various aspects of the data. These two sections are followed by the transcribed document itself, which runs to more than 500 pages.

A portion of Cook's "Introduction" covers the same ground as the obituary that he wrote for the Hispanic American Historical Review in 2000. For those unfamiliar with Pease, however, suffice it to say that for the last third of the 20th Century, until his untimely death in 1999, Franklin Pease was the leading ethnohistorian in Peru. His focus was mainly on the Inca and the early colonial period, for which he consistently provided new insights into the changes that took place just before and after the Spanish conquest. Moreover, Franklin's research, teaching, and professional contacts emphasized a multi-disciplinary approach — among others, he counted anthropologists, archaeologists, and geographers among his close friends, along with the broad community of Peruvian and Peruvianist historians. Cook's "Introduction" puts all of this into perspective. Included in this section is material that describes the visitas that were carried out in Peru during the 16th and 17th centuries. There are detailed descriptions of the visitas that began in the 1540s through to the time of Viceroy Toledo (c. 1570), when more systematic instructions were provided to the numerous visitadores being sent out to explore and enumerate the Viceroyalty. One of the visitas of the post-Toledoan period was that of 1591 in the middle Colca Valley (the subject of Pease's Collaguas I). Shortly thereafter, severe ecological and demographic problems, caused by the eruption of a nearby volcano and by a major epidemic, resulted in significant stress among the population of Lari Collaguas, such that a new visita was ordered by Viceroy Velasco in 1603. It is the transcription of this visita , carried out by Gerónimo Dáila to determine the actual number of surviving tribute payers, that forms the bulk of this volume.

The second part of the book is David Robinson's study of the 1604-05 visita. After a short geographical background, Robinson begins a discussion of problems with the visita document. Briefly, the visita is divided into two sections, covering the two basic divisions of the population: urinsaya [hurinsaya] and anasaya [hanansaya] — the former representing the upper or leading ayllu, and the latter the lower or subordinate ayllu. While the anasaya visita is complete, less than half of the urinsaya visita is known to exist. Obviously, this creates significant problems for the study of the Lari Collaguas population in the early 17th Century, although surviving summary pages mitigate these problems to a certain extent. Also, within the existing pages, there are some words that are unreadable, missing, or otherwise unknown. This is particularly true for some of the toponyms. In 1604-05, for example, the visita recorded 495 named agricultural fields, whereas a 1978 list of named fields in the Lari area had 629 examples, and, more significantly, the variation from place to...