Village Settlement and the Colonial Legacy in Southern Peru

Abstract

THE current rural settlement in the highlands of Peru and Boliva reflects an administrative fiat imposed on the Andean landscape by an alien culture four centuries ago. The dwellings of the indigenes were dispersed, but between 1570 and 1575 the Spanish viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, ordered their concentration in more than a thousand compact villages known as reducciones. A million or more Indians were torn from their homes and resettled in tight clusters so that it would be easier for the Spanish authorities to control and acculturate them.2 Subsequent rural settlements in the central Andes developed mainly as offshoots of the original reducciones; most post-Toledan villages resembled the ones built in the early 1570s. The reducci6n system is one example of landscape design imposed by bureaucratic decree. Three prime geographical components can be identified in this type of landscape design: the characteristics of the physical environment, the cultural configuration of the habitants, and the goals of the imposing authority or group. The native peoples of the Andes had adapted to the mountainous terrain, the highly compressed climatic zones, and the availability of local resources. That finely tuned man-land adjustment culminated in the Incan empire which ended when the Spaniards conquered Peru between 1532 and 1533. The Spaniards were self-consciously the bearers of the Mediterranean variety of Western civilization. One aspect of Andean society and culture that they altered was the settlement system. Mindful of the role of the past in molding the present, we examine the results of the implementation of that Spanish edict on a portion of the high Andes. To examine the fate of the European-imposed nuclei, we focus on the southwestern portion of the department of Cuzco. This rugged, remote zone of the southern Peruvian highlands encompasses nearly 14,000 square kilometers. A plateau between 3,500 and 4,200 meters above sea level dominates the area; in some places mountains rise as high as 5,271 meters (Fig. 1). The