Ordering Buildings, Building Order: Place Production in a Planned Colonial Town in Highland Peru

Author(s): Steven Wernke; Teddy Abel Traslaviña

Year: 2015

Summary

In the 1570s, the Viceroy of Peru Francisco de Toledo instituted one of the largest forced resettlement programs in world history: the Reducción General de Indios (General Resettlement of Indians). Some 1.4 million native Andeans were forcibly resettled into over 1,000 planned colonial reducción ("reduction") towns built on gridded street plans throughout the viceroyalty. Through the media of the built environment, the Reducción was to be a means of generating a new social order from the ground up. Despite the scale and pace of this program, its implementation and effects over such a vast and diverse area remain poorly documented and understood. This presentation begins to address a key question about the resettlement process itself: how were the reducciones built? Intensive mapping, architectural survey, lichenometric dating and systematic intensive surface artifact collections at a 40 ha reducción town in highland Peru demonstrate its intrusive placement on a major Inka center, and the recycling of that prior settlement's core ceremonial spaces. Analysis of relationships between the urban blocks of the settlement and domestic compounds indicates considerable local autonomy in the construction of internal domestic spaces. These insights point to the limits of microscopically-attuned viceregal panoptics boasted in official textual sources.

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Cite this Record

Ordering Buildings, Building Order: Place Production in a Planned Colonial Town in Highland Peru. Steven Wernke, Teddy Abel Traslaviña. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396391)

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Keywords

General
andes • Built Environment • Colonialism

Geographic Keywords
South America

Spatial Coverage

min long: -93.691; min lat: -56.945 ; max long: -31.113; max lat: 18.48 ;