Pacha y presentación: La conversión colonial de Huarochirí prehistórica

Abstract

In this chapter I consider the religious conversion of Indian populations as the primary objective of Catholic evangelization during the first two centuries of the Spanish colonial period in Huarochiri (in the highlands east of Lima). I demonstrate how these activities were performative acts aimed at the conversion of space, which had implications for the conversion of the Andean past. Due to its unique Quechua manuscript, Huarochiri has been an epicenter both for studies of evangelization and for the reconstruction of the culture and history of the prehispanic and colonial indigenous world. However, the prevalence of ethnohistoric studies and the lack of systematic archaeology in the central axis of the manuscript’s composition has hindered deeper understandings of Huarochiri’s past and the different historicities employed in its reconstruction. Here history is combined with recent systematic archaeological research to provide a view of the different ways the past was understood, codified, and communicated in Huarochiri’s past–evident both in the material record and in the contents of the manuscript itself. The evidence presented challenges the prevalent ethnohistorical reconstruction of Huarochiri’s prehistory, demonstrating how both the contents and the very concept of history were converted as narrative sequences were conflated with historical sequences, obscuring culturally distinct forms of understanding, codifying, and communicating the past in the indigenous Andes. Additional archaeological and historical data provide a glimpse of an «Andean historicity».