Continuity and Hiatus in the Archaeology of Mobility: A Case Study from Southern Peru/Northern Chile

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Lost in Transition: Social and Political Changes in the Central Southern Andes from the Late Prehispanic to the Early Colonial Periods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Despite excellent work in the field over the past two decades, the tensions between continuity and rupture in archaeological accounts of the colonial ‘transition’ in the Andes have tended to remain under-theorized. Drawing on recent fieldwork in Tacna (southern Peru) and Arica (northern Chile), I explore a case study focused on the Inca tambo (waystation) and its afterlife during the colonial period. As a key Inca institution that would be adopted and remade as part of new colonial regimes of mobility, the tambo offers interesting possibilities for exploring the transition. Yet the tambos in the research area were primarily built in the 15th and 19th centuries and apparently separated by a substantial hiatus of several centuries. This absence drove methodological changes towards a wider spatial scale of analysis and a refinement of survey resolution to pick up other traces of the early colonial period. This discussion raises wider questions in turn both about the ways we engage with multiple temporalities and about our relationships with other disciplinary perspectives on the Inca and colonial periods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Lost in Transition: Social and Political Changes in the Central Southern Andes from the Late Prehispanic to the Early Colonial Periods   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25612