Overview
Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua looks at the encounters between existing populations and newcomers from successive waves of colonization, from indigenous expansion states (Wari, Tiwanaku, and Inka) to the foreign Spaniards, and the way each group “re-spatialized” the landscape according to its own political and economic ends. Viewing these spatializations from political, economic, and religious perspectives, Rice considers both the ideological and material occurrences.
Concluding with a special focus on the multiple space-time considerations involved in Spanish-inspired ceramics from the region, Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua integrates the local and rural with the global and urban in analyzing the events and processes of colonialism. It is a vital contribution to the literature of Andean studies and will appeal to students and scholars of archaeology, historical archaeology, history, ethnohistory, and globalization.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781607322764 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University Press of Colorado |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
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Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua
By Prudence M. Rice
University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2013 University Press of ColoradoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-276-4
CHAPTER 1
Moquegua
A Landscape Perspective
An anthropology whose objects are no longer conceived as automatically and naturally anchored in space will need to pay particular attention to the way spaces and places are made, imagined, contested, and enforced.
— Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997a: 47)
Moquegua — more specifically, the valley of the Río Osmore and its tributary streams — has a long history of contacts with, and colonization by, expansionist states. Colonization begins at least as early as the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era, with settlers from hundreds of kilometers distant: Wari to the north and Tiwanaku to the southeast. Later, in the late fifteenth century, the Inkas from Cusco, midway between these earlier centers, made their presence felt in Moquegua. Finally, in the sixteenth century, the Osmore drainage came to be occupied by an alien culture — the rapacious, emergent-capitalist, rabidly evangelical Spaniards. Subsequent centuries of growing settlement left an indelible imprint on the landscape, particularly with respect to agricultural production as evidenced by small plots on valley flatland demarcated by walls, trees, irrigation canals, and roads. Today, the Panamerican Highway streaks along the east side of the river course before veering southeast and disappearing into the barren hills. The growing city of Moquegua and its urban services dominate the upper mid-valley, whereas to the south the landscape is rural, its built environment consisting of the adobe ruins of Colonial and later wine haciendas dotting the margins.
All these waves of colonists, despite having different traditions and speaking different languages, shared similar economies — agro-pastoral, with metallurgy and vast trading networks — and valued similar resources. They all contributed to the layers of imbricated places and meanings in the landscape of today's Moquegua. How did they "learn the new landscape" (Rockman and Steele 2003) of the southwestern region? How were landscape, space, and place variably defined, bounded, named, and otherwise cognitively structured by the participants in these emplaced interactions? My interest is in both "contact" and "colonialism" (see Silliman 2005), especially in one aspect of the power relations and negotiations inherent in the latter: How was the Osmore valley "re-spatialized," particularly with the entry of the Spaniards and subsequent entanglements with Catholicism, capitalist market forces, and nascent globalization? The area's multi-ethnicity and multivocality are of special interest, given evidence of considerable ethno-linguistic diversity.
SPATIALITY AND SPATIALIZATION: LANDSCAPE, SPACE, AND PLACE
Spaces, both built and "natural," are constitutive of social actions and relations, while at the same time those actions and relations structure and order spaces (Keith and Pile 1993a). My interest is in the various spatialities and spatializations constructed in the Andean environment of Moquegua as they can be accessed through archaeological and documentary evidence.
Spatiality refers to the perceived qualities or conditions that define socially produced spaces and their functions. These qualities and conditions order a landscape and its places. Dictionary definitions of the term spatiality do not begin to approach the nuances of its meanings in anthropology and geography, which emphasize both social and physical spaces and individuals' and groups' interactions with them. Social groups create unique definitions of space, its use, and its meaning based on their values, economic activities, myths, and histories. Spatialities exist at multiple levels or scales, and because they may be variably perceived and defined, they are almost invariably contested (Keith and Pile 1993b: 26).
Spatialization refers to how — the recursive processes by which — such structuring spatialities are created and recreated (see Martin and Ringham 2006: 190). These processes include defining, naming, bounding, and cognitively ordering spaces, not all of which are detectable archaeologically. Similarly, geographers might analyze the creation and use of space on the basis of processes of their appropriation, environment, exploitation, and management). In the topographically diverse Andes region, spaces are not only horizontally defined, but their vertical dimensions are also significant structuring elements, both physically and cognitively.
A landscape is generally considered a particular segment of a holistically perceived/construed/experienced environment as shaped by both natural and cultural processes (see, e.g., Naveh and Lieberman 1993: 3–5). A landscape may be considered a "cognitive or symbolic ordering of space" (Ingold 1993: 152) or, more epigrammatically, a "network of places" (Chapman 2008: 188), a "layered artifact" (Dunning et al. 1999: 650), or an "additive amalgam" (Fisher and Feinman 2005: 64) that is "simultaneously place, process, and time" (Silverman 2004: 4). Landscapes are at once "real and imagined, objective and subjective, past and present, space and place, nature and culture" (Fowles 2010: 461). Most salient, landscapes are not static: they are ever-changing, as natural processes and human activities transform them at the same time as they contour human behavior. Landscapes have been studied by geographers with various specializations but also — and increasingly — by archaeologists interested in how centuries and millennia of human activity influenced landscapes' production and perception (David and Thomas 2008).
Certain kinds of socially constructed spaces are "places." Places are "politicized, culturally relative, historically specific" spaces that "come into being through praxis" (Rodman 1992: 641–42). That is, they are lived and experienced spaces, which makes them "meaning-full." Places have socially assigned meanings — spatialities — that can change over time, that can be multiple, that can differ among actors, and that can shape and be shaped by memory (ibid.; Van Dyke 2008; Whitridge 2004).
Spaces and places may or may not have boundaries, and such boundaries can be conceptual/symbolic, socio-political, physical/spatial, or some combination thereof. Symbolic boundaries separate conceptual classes that allow actors to categorize components of their realities and to establish "us-them" identity distinctions (Lamont and Molnár 2002: 168). Social boundaries are closely linked to, and often reconfigurations of, symbolic boundaries: they establish patterns of relations among groups of individuals (e.g., by class, sex, ethnicity) as well as access to resources (ibid.: 168 — 69, 186). Physical or spatial boundaries (see Jones 2010) may be "natural" (e.g., oceans, rivers, mountain ranges, deserts) or human constructions, the latter typically reifying social boundaries. The crossing of physical boundaries — entering a church, passing through gates in walls, checking passports at national borders — is often ritualized and accompanied by some degree of transformation of the actor's identity.
How can archaeologists begin to approach perceptions of a landscape or concepts of space and place in ancient times, especially those of non-literate societies? The process is fraught with incertitude, as efforts to define landscape and the related concepts of space and place have resulted in little agreement for either operations or heuristics. Because scholars frequently decry the application of strict binaries (e.g., nature vs. culture; "Cartesian dualism") in establishing and clarifying the distinctions, the terms overlap and appear to be fuzzy sets or elements of fuzzy sets.
Varied approaches to investigating relations between society and the built environment (Hillier 2008; Hillier and Hanson 1984; Upton 1991) are applicable more generally to relations between the built and natural environments. "Society-first" approaches begin by analyzing the spatial dimensions of social processes to understand the (built) environment, whereas "environment-first" analysis begins by looking at the spatial forms of the (built) environment for evidence of social processes. Archaeologists may adopt either, although the latter is more amenable to development of testable hypotheses about design (Hillier 2008). My approach is similar to that of vernacular architectural historian Dell Upton (1991: 198), who describes "cultural landscapes" as constructions that fuse the physical with the inhabitants' imaginations: they are the "product of powerful yet diffuse imaginations, fractured by the faultlines of class, culture, and personality" of both their builders and those who study them. Here I am interested in the historical trajectory of spatializations of landscape, space, and place — built and natural — in the Moquegua area and how they were variably defined, bounded, named, and otherwise cognitively and physically (re)structured by its succession of colonists and continuing residents.
Fortunately, numerous scholars have preceded me in analyzing these phenomena in the Andes (e.g., Acuto 2005; Bouysse-Cassagne 1986; Gade 1992; Kaulicke et al]. 2003; Moore 2004, 2005; Scott 2009; Silverman 2004; van de Guchte 1999; Wernke 2007b), particularly with respect to the Inkas. The Moquegua rural, vernacular landscape and its spaces and places have not been explicitly investigated, however, at least as they might have been perceived by indigenous peoples and interlopers alike, which establishes my goal here: to explore the different layers of spatialities through time and at the time of contact, and how they structured power relations.
A landscape can be the starting point of an analysis, beginning with describing it as a whole and moving to identify its constituent spaces and places. Alternatively, the process can begin with identification of particular spaces and places and how they fit together to constitute a landscape. I make use of both approaches here, as they are appropriate to the task. I am especially interested in places, both natural and human-made, and, in particular, I give weight to Moquegua's toponyms (chapter 5). If a geographic locus, large or small, is given a specific name, it has been, by that very action, cognitively (or emically) identified as a place that is significant in some way to some group of people. That significance may be social, political, economic, religio-ritual, or based on some other dimension of experience and acknowledged or unrecognized by others who come into contact with the place.
The Department of Moquegua in general, and the Osmore drainage in particular, constituted a distinct kind of space in pre-Hispanic and Spanish-colonial times: a periphery (Rice 2011b). For at least a millennium and a half, Moquegua — as landscape, space, and place — represented a social, economic, and political periphery, particularly a frontier of agricultural colonization by expansionist states. Throughout the late history of human occupation of the Andes, the Osmore valley and its rich but limited arable existed on the margins of larger, more powerful societies whose centers lay well beyond. This peripheral status had a deep imprint on constructions of space and place in the department.
CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT
Because of its high-quality soils and temperate climate (chapter 2), the Osmore drainage was for centuries a favored destination for agricultural colonists sent from empires centered in higher elevations in the Andean sierra and altiplano. Thus a brief overview of late Andean chronology and the ethno-linguistico-political affiliations of the peoples impacting the history of the Osmore basin is useful before delving into the details of these cultures.
Archaeologists divide the late pre-Hispanic occupation of Andean Peru into alternating horizons and periods (table 1.1): horizons are intervals of broad quasi-imperial domination, and periods are intervals of political decentralization and regionalization. During the Middle Horizon (MH), two large states — Wari (Huari) and Tiwanaku (Tiahuanaco) — dominated southern Peru and established colonies in Moquegua. Of greater interest here are the succeeding Late Intermediate Period (LIP) and Late Horizon (LH). The LIP in Moquegua saw the withdrawal of Wari and Tiwanaku influence and abandonment of their colonies. The relatively brief LH is marked by Inka expansion throughout the Andes, which was truncated by Spanish conquest.
Analyses of Andeans' cognitive organization of their social and spatial environments emphasize various dualities, including high-low, male-female, dry-wet, and left-right (Bouysse-Cassagne 1986; Dean 2007). During the LH and likely earlier, dual organization was manifest socially, economically, and politically in the organization of the ayllu (Quechua; Aymara hatha). Ayllus are kin-based residential and landholding collectivities of various sizes, sometimes spatially dispersed, whose members claim a common founding ancestor. Land is held by the ayllu as an inalienable resource for the use of its members and is not privately owned, although usufruct passes through the female line. Members of an ayllu labor together to raise crops and herds and manage resources, including lands and irrigation systems (see, e.g., Cavagnaro Orellana 1988: 109; Cushner 1980: 25; Moseley 1992: 49–52; Silverblatt 1987: 217–20; Urton 1990: 22–23). Ayllus held responsibility for meeting annual labor and tax obligations to their Inka and later Spanish overlords, for example, through maize or textile production (see Urton 1990: 22–24, 76–77).
(Continues...)
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