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Negotiating Community and Landscape in the Peruvian Andes: A Transconquest View
Author(s) -
WERNKE STEVEN A.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.2007.109.1.130
Subject(s) - negotiation , colonialism , settlement (finance) , residence , geography , land tenure , power (physics) , local community , land use , scale (ratio) , archaeology , ethnology , history , political science , sociology , ecology , demography , cartography , social science , law , agriculture , physics , quantum mechanics , world wide web , computer science , payment , biology
This article explores how constructs of “community” and “landscape” mediate power relations between households and colonial states. I analyze archaeological and documentary data in a common spatial framework to reconstruct the local‐scale negotiation of community and land‐use organization during successive colonial occupations by the Inka and Spanish states in the Colca Valley of southern highland Peru. Using GIS‐based analytical tools, I present a detailed reconstruction of the land‐tenure patterns of Andean corporate descent groups ( ayllus ) registered in colonial visitas from the heartland of the Collagua Province. I then compare these land‐tenure patterns to archaeological settlement patterns from the Inka occupation (C.E. 1450–C.E. 1532) and subsequent early Colonial Period occupation up to the forced resettlement of the local populace into compact, European‐style reducción villages in the 1570s. This analysis reveals how both Inka and Spanish colonialist projects for reordering and rationalizing local community and land‐use organization were met by local understandings and interests that emerged from patterns of land tenure, residence, and the features of the built environment.