Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua

Part 2: Indigenous Spacesand Places

31 Part II Indigenous Spaces and Places Moquegua’s long history of occupation began more than 10,000 years ago, with the large Ring Site shell mound registering early exploitation of Peru’s productive coastal waters (Sandweiss et al. 1989). But population sizes and densities were low, leaving little evidence of how the landscape was perceived and how (or if) significant places were constructed by its early inhabitants . The valley’s status as a colonized landscape began a millennium before the arrival of Europeans, when its comparatively rich soils and temperate climate meant that it was widely perceived as an attractive agricultural space.Moquegua thus became a distant annex attached to larger,more densely settled,territorially expansionist states. The spatializations—the ordering of the valley’s open agricultural spaces and the distributions of built places and boundaries—produced by these early colonists , still low in numbers, made an imprint that is still visible on the landscape. Moquegua’s occupational history before and after the arrival of the European colonists is dominated by relations with the altiplano. There, during the Late Intermediate Period (LIP), a number of petty kingdoms , or señoríos, developed in the Lake Titicaca basin, filling the power vacuum left by the collapse of the powerful Middle Horizon (MH) state of Tiwanaku, south of the lake in Bolivia. Moquegua’s residents had particularly close ties to two rival señoríos of Aymaraspeakers that emerged in the western basin: the Qolla (Colla) and the Lupaqa. The Qolla appear to have been the more powerful of the two groups in the LIP, sending agricultural colonists to cultivate maize, coca, and peppers in the temperate river valleys throughout the southwestern region of what is now Peru, from INDIGENOUS SPACES AND PLACES 32 Arequipa through northern Chile. During the Late Horizon (LH), the Inka created an alliance with the Lupaqa, deploying them as agricultural colonists in the tributaries of the Río Osmore. A distinctive set of policies of Inka imperial administration involved the resettlement of peoples—particularly those with special skills such as pottery making, weaving, or stone working—from the conquered provinces into these new areas, often far from their homelands. This clustering was done in part to facilitate payment of tribute obligations (Julien 1983: 78). At least six other categories of resettlement can be identified (ibid.: 78–79,citing Cieza de León 1967 [1553]: 55, 73–78, 83–84, 232), including people who were relocated • when a new territory was organized as a province, “for security reasons and to aid in the acculturation of the inhabitants to their role as subjects of the empire”; • “to frontier areas to serve as garrisons”; • “as colonies in underpopulated regions to bring them into production”; • to grow or collect “certain plants unavailable at home, like maize, coca and a variety of fruits”; • from the coast to highland administrative centers “to facilitate storage of goods”; and • “from hilltop locations to more level ground.” These practices were part of Inka re-spatialization strategies, a set of policies and practices intended to restructure alien spaces for economic and political purposes and order them in line with imperial goals. New communities were often strategically placed “away from local political, economic, and cultural centers, in areas that local agents experienced as peripheral , marginal, and even dangerous” (Acuto 2005: 222). As a result of this liberal resettlement policy, the cultural landscape of the Andes increasingly became a mosaic of discontinuous, inter-digitated colonies and enclaves of highlanders and coastal dwellers and northern and southern Andeans (Ramírez 2005: 37–39). Through this and related policies and practices, the Inka constructed new landscapes “embedded into the imperial ideology, [and] resignified the sense of place that these marginal regions had for local communities . . . Center became periphery and periphery became centers” (Acuto 2005: 222). It is also important to remember that in the mountainous Andes, spaces and spatializations were not only horizontal but also perceptually and literally vertical, and higher elevations may be associated with higher indigenous statuses. A key consequence of the waxing and waning of outside political powers over the centuries in Peru is that the southwestern region in general,and the Osmore INDIGENOUS SPACES AND PLACES 33 drainage in particular, was home to colonists speaking various languages and having different cultural traditions.The LIP Qolla and LH Lupaqa colonists in the sierras spoke Aymara and the Inka, if any “ethnic” Inka were actually present...