Supplies, Status, and Slavery: Contested Aesthetics of Provisioning at the Jesuit Haciendas of Nasca Abstract The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wine- and brandy-producing estates owned by the Society of Jesus in Nasca, Peru, held a large enslaved population of diverse sub-Saharan origins. Enslaved actors, together with a minority of black freepersons and itinerant indigenous and mestizo laborers, relied on goods and foodstuffs supplied by their Jesuit administrators along with products they provisioned themselves. The aesthetic worlds of the estates were contested through the ways in which these actors engaged and provisioned themselves, making use of material culture and foodways to strategically manipulate their statuses and produce meaning reflective of their diverse origins and entanglements.

Rural Cuzco before and after Inka Imperial Conquest: Foodways, Status, and Identity (Maras, Peru) Abstract State expansion brings cultural change or persistence, and foodways reveal how status and identity result from these events. We examine diet choices and food service at two large villages in the Inka imperial heartland (Cuzco, Peru). Yunkaray was occupied during the time of early Inka expansion (eleventh to fifteenth centuries), whereas Cheqoq housed a late imperial (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries) multiethnic retainer population serving the Inka nobility. We use faunal remains and ceramic assemblages to reveal the uneven process of “Inkanization” and find that migrated retainer laborers had greater affinities with Inka practices than early Inka marriage partners.

Inka Urban Planning, Royal Aesthetic Signaling, and Ruination Processes at Huánuco Pampa Abstract Built on a high plain in the Peruvian Andes, the Inka center of Huánuco Pampa remained partially occupied during and after the period of Spanish colonial rule. This paper addresses how Inka urban planning influenced processes of ruination and local identity-building in the centuries leading up to the 1960s, when professional archaeologists began to work at the site. The same aesthetic signals intended to mark royal Inka spaces at Huánuco Pampa encouraged the long-term use of the site by local Andean highlanders, as well as more recent work to develop the site as an example of national and global heritage.

Colonialism and Domestic Life: Identities and Foodways in Huarochirí During the Inka Empire Abstract Before the arrival of the Spanish, Andean populations were in the process of redefining their own community and ethnic identities following incorporation into the Inka Empire. During the Inka period (1450–1532 CE), new domestic spaces were built in the highland region of Huarochirí. However, this change did not imply a substantial transformation of domestic life or consumption practices. Through archaeological excavations, architectural, ceramic, and zooarchaeological spatial analysis, we argue that everyday domestic life in Ampugasa was not strongly impacted by the Inka presence. Rather, architectural changes and domestic consumption patterns were built upon local practices already existing in Huarochirí.

Inside the Reducción: Crafting Colonial Foodways at Carrizales and Mocupe Viejo, Zaña Valley, Peru (1570–1700) Abstract This study explores the politics of indigenous foodways in early colonial Peru, examining the processes by which indigenous households adapted to demographic stress, resettlement, and evangelization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries CE. We examine faunal and botanical data from two planned towns (reducciones) located in Peru’s Zaña Valley—Carrizales and Mocupe Viejo. Inter- and intra-site comparison of food procurement and diet reveal different strategies and timing in the ways that Eurasian products were incorporated into native foodways, suggesting that while Old World animal domesticates were rapidly integrated into the indigenous diet, plant domesticates tied to the Iberian palate were not as readily adopted.

Temporal Plurality and Temporal Transgressions: Time and Things in an Early Colonial Period Mortuary Assemblage from Northern Highland Ecuador Abstract The power of archaeology as an arm of postcolonial studies lies with its focus on the material dimensions of colonialism and its ability to interrogate the role of things in negotiating the terrain of cultural dissonance. This paper contributes to the postcolonial critique by taking up the matter of temporality and historicity from an indigeno-centric perspective, offering an analysis of the notion of temporal plurality via a focus on the “time of materials.” The context of the study is a specific mortuary assemblage from a shaft tomb in the northern Andean highlands of Ecuador dating to the early Colonial period. This example is used to illustrate the way objects, as elements of heterogeneous assemblages, can create distinct temporalities that work to contravene or resist assimilation to the regime of historicity. The assemblage analyzed here conveys an ontology of temporal plurality that encompassed both radical continuity and radical change. As one example among many, it serves to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about the universality of historical time, the “natural” segregation of past, present, and future, and the significance of European artifacts in indigenous contexts.

Defining Identity during Revitalization: Taki Onqoy in the Chicha-Soras Valley (Ayacucho, Peru) Abstract Sixteenth-century Spanish evangelization was initially haphazard and varied, producing a patchwork of Andean Catholic converts whose formalized commitment to the new religion (baptisms, marriage rites, funerals) hinged on regional priests. In the 1560s CE, a revitalization movement known as Taki Onqoy (Quechua: “dancing sickness”) fostered a population of highland Andean peoples who preached for the rejection of Spanish traditions, religious beliefs, and practices. This article presents results from the first archaeological study of Taki Onqoy. Ceramic, faunal, and mortuary data suggest that rather than a monolithic body of individuals who denied or rejected Catholicism, Andeans were entangled within the two religious sects.

Introduction to Status and Identity in the Imperial Andes: A Collection of Transhistorical Studies Abstract The papers in this special issue arise from the Status and Identity in the Imperial Andes session held at the 2017 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver, Canada. That session focused on the role of status and power in shaping colonial interactions and identities throughout the Andes during the fifteenth to seventeenth century CE. The papers in this issue examine how Inka and colonial period individuals (indigenous, African, Iberian, mestizo, etc.) selectively incorporated or rejected Imperial goods, and how differing levels of access to these goods may have influenced social status, health, and relationships with imperial actors.

The Past, Present, and Future of Transconquest Archaeologies in the Andes Abstract I reflect on how the series of essays in this themed issue map out an emerging orientation in Andeanist archaeology, the transconquest perspective. Growing out of scholars’ engagements with the local dimensions of Inka and Spanish rule and the methodological and ontological divides that distinguish “history” and “prehistory,” the transconquest perspective attends to the affective connections that constitute polities and shape imperial transitions. I discuss its development, consider the ways in which these articles put it into practice, and suggest two directions in which transconquest archaeologies are pointing the study of colonialism and imperialism, in the Andes and elsewhere.

Becoming “Rebels” and “Idolaters” in the Valley of Volcanoes, Southern Peru Abstract In the mid-eighteenth century around the town of Andagua in the high Southern Peruvian Andes, local indigenous residents nearly incited a rebellion rejecting regional authorities from Arequipa with ancestor cults as a locus of resistance. Subsequently, colonial officials burned ancestral mummies, in attempts to eradicate Andean religious beliefs and practices. Through the use of multiple methods and an archaeological perspective, this article examines how residents became “rebels and idolaters.” Challenging the universal subject and recognizing how subjectivities are historical and particular, I review how identities emerge through the production of places, forming relationships with the landscape across time and space.