Archaeology in the Lettered City

The ‘lettered creole’ Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora is widely seen as an antiquarian who collected textual materials associated with the indigenous past. But Sigüenza's historical interest exceeded both the textual and the indigenous. Following a popular insurrection in 1692, which left the viceroy's palace in ruins, Sigüenza was asked to present a proposal for segregating Mexico City into distinct Spanish and Indian zones. He framed his project not as an attempt to trace a new line but as the recuperation of an old one, ‘excavating’ the original plan laid out by Hernán Cortés. Drawing on recent work in the field of archaeology and proposing a revisionist history of Mexican archaeology, this essay reads Sigüenza's interventions in the wake of the uprising as articulating an ‘archaeology of the colonial present’ whose modalities include both digging and ‘walking in the city.’ This operation renders the Spanish city a colonial ruin to be curated by a creole administrative apparatus. For the first time, the Spanish present has become the colonial past.     

Household Archaeology in the Andes

Data from domestic contexts can be used to address significant anthropological research questions. Archaeological investigations in the Andes (areas once incorporated into the Inka empire, including northwestern Argentina, highland Bolivia, northern Chile, Ecuador, and Peru), like many parts of the world, rely on ethnohistory and ethnography to interpret the archaeological remains of domestic areas and make inferences about households. In this review I describe the ideas about Andean households that archaeologists are using and how domestic remains are being examined to infer social, economic, and political processes. Household archaeology in the Andes requires ethnoarchaeology and theory-building in order to understand the complex social dynamics at the foundation of ancient Andean societies.     

The Archaic Period in the south-central Andes

Although the Archaic Period of the south-central Andes is not well-known beyond Latin America, there is much of interest in it to archaeologists working with foraging populations. Like the North American Archaic and European Mesolithic, the Archaic in the region is characterized by ethnic differentiation, changes in the scale and frequency of residential mobility, resource intensification and specialization, and population growth. The origin and evolutionary trajectory of these trends are discussed within the context of the development of ecological complementarity, a strategy of land use that exploits the vertically stratified distribution of resources in the Andean environment.     

Oppression and opportunity: Migration and markets in the colonial Andes

The Kingdom of Quito, 1690–1830: The State and Regional Development. By KENNETH J. ANDRIEN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xi, 255.

Power and Violence in the Colonial City: Oruro from the Mining Renaissance to the Rebellion of Tupac Amaru (1740–1782). By OSCAR CORNBLIT. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xii, 227.

Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes: At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology. Edited by BROOKE LARSON and OLIVIA HARRIS with ENRIQUE TANDETER. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Pp. 428.

Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito. By KAREN VIERA POWERS. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Pp. xii, 236.

Comercio y fraude en el Perú colonial. Las estrategias mercantiles de un banquero. By MARGARITA SUAREZ. Lima: IEP‐BCR, 1995. Pp. 137.

They Eat from Their Labor: Works and Social Change in Colonial Bolivia. By ANN ZULAWSKI. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. Pp. xiv, 283.     

Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Movements in Latin America and the World

Marvin Harris. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture. New York: Random House, 1974. 276 pp. References. $7.95 (cloth).     

Indigenous agriculture in the Americas

Significant advances in our understanding of ancient agricultural practices in the Americas have been made in recent years. This review of the literature focuses on studies published between 1987 and early 1994. Issues pertaining to the transition from foraging to farming include the habitability of the American tropics prior to the development of agriculture, theories on plant domestication and the origins of agriculture, regional syntheses of agricultural development, and the origin, evolution, and dissemination of domesticates in the Americas. Other topics reviewed include new techniques that have recently been applied to the study of prehistoric agriculture in the Americas, various approaches to the study of agricultural change, and ways in which research on ancient agricultural practices is being applied in modern experimental agriculture and rural development projects.     

Fixing the Hole in the Bucket: Household Poverty Dynamics in the Peruvian Andes

Achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty will require simultaneous action on two separate fronts: helping poor people escape from poverty, and stemming the flow of people into poverty. This article examines forty Peruvian communities, and finds that descents into poverty have occurred alongside escapes in every one of them. Escape and descent are asymmetric in terms of reasons: while one set of reasons is responsible for escapes from poverty, another and different set of reasons is associated with descent. Making progress in poverty reduction will require measures to accelerate escapes whilst at the same time slowing down descents. The article looks at the different policies which will be required to serve these two separate purposes.     

The many deaths of Manuel: Illness and fate in the Andes

In a village of the Equatorial Andes, a woman tells of the sudden death of her epileptic husband in disturbing circumstances. The study of the Manuel case through his wife's account shows the essential role of the aetiology of a morbid phenomenon in understanding its fatal outcome, as well as the subordination of nosology — shared by all the members of the collectivity — to a personal interpretation by the victim — or his spokesman. Finally, when the victim can no longer describe his illness following the loss of the vernacular language — in this case Quechua — the language of the body can fill this silence.     

Parental Grief and Mourning in the Ancient Andes

Parental grief is an intense emotion shaped and mediated by cultural attitudes toward death, the strength of parent-child attachment, the age of the deceased child, and the role of children in society. Despite some assertions that high infant mortality or economic hardship may lessen parental grief, cross-cultural studies show that child death often causes emotional distress to parents, in particular mothers. Funerary treatments of children, especially infants, are often simplified, contradicting more immediate and immaterial expressions of parental grief that cannot be studied archaeologically. In this study, I examine the funerary treatment of children in ancient Andean Tiwanaku society (A.D. 500–1100). I assess the use of ritual practices and objects associated with children’s burials as indicative of children’s social identities and parental mourning. The nature of grave assemblages in regard to different ages of the children suggests that parental attitudes toward their children changed over the course of childhood. The choice of offerings seems to reflect parental attachment to and recognition of the child’s life. Modifications of ceramic vessels point to the intimate mourning gestures of grieving mothers who sought to provide their deceased children with the necessary offerings to assume their place among the community of venerated ancestors. This study draws on ethnographic, psychological, and ethnohistoric sources of parent-child bonds in the Andes and beyond to investigate children’s burials not merely as reflective of childhood and children’s role in society but as the material record of parental attachment and emotion in the past.     

Landscape and Environment: Insights from the Prehispanic Central Andes

Attention to human–environment relationships in the central Andes has a long history. Although the area is not a neat microcosm of the globe, wholly representative of worldwide trends in the archaeology of human–environment interactions, it has been the site of both seminal investigations in archaeology and a substantial body of recent work that investigates themes of broad archaeological relevance. Specifically, central Andean environments have been variously conceived as structuring, modified, and sacred. These approaches to some extent reflect broad trends in archaeology, while also suggesting directions in which the archaeology of human–environment interactions is moving and highlighting archaeology’s relevance to discussions of contemporary human–environment interactions. This article characterizes concepts that are key for describing central Andean environments and considers the ways in which the particular ecology of the central Andes has informed archaeological research in the region. The example of the central Andes highlights the importance of understanding environments as dynamic, considering both geomorphic and anthropogenic contributors to that dynamism, and examining both ecological (“environment”) and ideological (“landscape”) implications of archaeological landscapes.     

Mare Nullius: Indigenous Rights in Saltwater Environments

This article uses two case studies to illustrate the subjection of indigenous peoples’ marine territories to a ‘double jeopardy’ of exclusion — jurisdictional and proprietary — through the legal and administrative practices of European ‘settler’ states in Australia and Canada. While the fiction of terra nullius as a legal rationale for refuting indigenous rights of property and governance has steadily eroded in recent decades, its counterpart mare nullius has proven, so far, more resistant. The authors examine how state conceptions of jurisdiction, property and boundary‐making in coastal areas accomplish the distortion and fragmentation of the coastal and marine spaces of Torres Strait Islanders in northern Queensland, Australia, and of the Cree and Inuit peoples of James and Hudson Bays in northern Que´bec, Canada. Assumptions of land–sea continuity underlie these peoples’ cultural constructions of coastal and marine environments. In examining the progress that each has made in reasserting ownership and control of coast and sea, it seems that recognition and reinforcement of their institutions for managing marine spaces and resources offer the best prospect for reconnecting fractured jurisdictional domains, and for bringing about social equity, environmental protection, and self‐determined regional development.