Colonial Encounters in the Prehispanic Andes

Over the past three decades, research on colonial processes in the South Central Andes has advanced substantially. This session explores the social, political, economic, and ideological transformations in the Andean past through a millennia of colonization in Southern Peru. We examine the roots of social inequality in colonial settings through a diverse set of archaeological data, with a special focus on the Wari, Tiwanaku, Inca, and Colonial Spanish enterprises. This work, built upon the Programa Contisuyo's three decades of research, draws now on the work of the next generation of scholars working in the region under the rubric of the Programa Colesuyo, a multi-year, interdisciplinary research program that unites three excavation projects and a set of museographic studies to highlight patterns in the process of colonization over the past 1500 years.