Negotiated Settlements: Andean Communities and Landscapes Under Inka and Spanish Colonialism

Abstract

In this impressive book, Steven A. Wernke combines archaeological and ethnohistorical methods to study the Colca Valley in southern Peru. The material spans a 500-year period from the twelfth to the early seventeenth century, during which the residents of the Colca Valley experienced first Inka and then Spanish colonization. The author, by employing the same analytical frame to interpret the effects of both Inka and Spanish colonization, works against the notion that archaeologists focus on pre-Hispanic times while historians cover the post-contact period.Chapter 1 introduces the Colca Valley and its inhabitants—the Aymara-speaking Collagua and the Quechua-speaking Cabana. Chapter 2 explicates the central theoretical concepts of the book: community and local landscape. Wernke understands these as the two areas where individual and imperial interests intersect. In chapter 3 Wernke pays special attention to the available ethnohistorical texts from 1591 to 1617, which provide both detailed demographic information and extensive land-use records for the Colca Valley. Chapter 4 presents the results of archaeological survey work, focusing on settlement patterning over a four-century span from autonomy to Inka rule. Importantly, Wernke’s research reveals that the Collagua and Cabana were not in conflict during the Late Intermediate period (1000–1450 CE), a finding contrary to the general impression of this era based on archaeology elsewhere in the Andes. Under Inka rule, however, ethnic boundaries hardened and political hierarchies were formalized. Although the Inka added ceremonial architecture and expanded agricultural and pastoral systems, they did so without much altering daily life.Chapter 5 analyzes Colca Valley settlement patterns in the early years following the Spanish occupation by tracking the building activity of Franciscan friars in the 1540s, who identified key locations where Inka administration had interfaced with local communities and established doctrinas (sites for Christian instruction) there. Although Wernke detects the Franciscans’ intent to alter religious practices by reshaping the built environment, he questions its success, noting that the reuse of sacred spaces only serves to reinforce spatial sanctity without guaranteeing the rejection of pre-Hispanic beliefs. Wernke’s reconstruction of the movement through one well-preserved doctrina, that of Malata, produces fascinating results: foot traffic refocused activity away from Inka structures to file individuals past colonial elites and toward the new colonial center. Space was thus deliberately reordered, suggesting that religious conversion was at least as much about bodily practices as it was about beliefs.Chapter 6 studies the effects of the Spanish reducción system, introduced by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Reducciones were new settlements aimed at reducing the number of small, isolated indigenous communities and at fundamentally altering those indigenous practices that complicated colonial governance. The spatial structure of reducciones intended to produce an unmediated relationship between households and the monitoring institutions of the church and state. Wernke concludes that the Spanish presence, in contrast to that of the Inka, resulted in a dramatic alteration of indigenous settlement patterns. In the following chapter Wernke focuses less on settlement patterns than on land use. He examines the reducción of Coporaque, located in a place unoccupied in pre-Hispanic times, to understand how the new settlement balanced indigenous community structures and land-use practices in ways that made sense to both colonizer and colonized. Making an ingenious methodological move, Wernke cross-references textual records with GIS (geographic information system) to reconstruct land-tenure patterns of those resettled to Coporaque by matching toponyms from agricultural field declarations in the ethnohistorical record with their counterparts in the modern landscape. The results reveal that the effects of reducción—both in the routines of daily life and in the visible traces of abandoned agricultural features in the landscape—are very much felt in the valley today.The concluding chapter provides a useful summary of Wernke’s significant findings and a synthesis of his research. This chapter shines because the methods are various and the time period covered is extensive. Because the author tacks back and forth, as he writes repeatedly (e.g., pp. 37, 154, 220), this summary of the research is of critical importance to the book’s success. The combination of methods employed in this book and the nuanced perspectives they provide draw attention to the contrasting visions of colonization produced by textual records and material evidence. Indeed, Wernke provides us with a model of thorough and well-thought-out research that doesn’t seek easy explanations but rather welcomes contradictory evidence that complicates our understanding of complex historical and cultural contexts. In both Aymara and Quechua, pacha means both “space” and “time.” How fitting, then, that this book spotlights land use over time. Although the study is locally situated, it is not just locally relevant. Wernke helps the reader understand the negotiation of everyday life under colonial occupation, even as the occupiers change. In so doing, the author has produced a text useful to archaeologists, ethnographers, ethnohistorians, and all Andeanists.