First Contact: Friend or Foe?

Summary

Native Andeans’ first contacts with foreigners were not necessarily with the Spanish foreigners themselves, but with the foreign pathogens that were introduced prior to the arrival of the Spaniards through trade networks and early incursions in the northern extent of the Inca Empire. Violent encounters with indigenous peoples followed the Spaniards as they made their way down the northwestern half of the Central Andes, such as the fateful battle in Cajamarca.Yet not all native Andeans perished by epidemic disease or fought battles against the Spaniards; some allied themselves with the Spaniards in the hopes of liberating themselves from Inca imperial rule.This paper theorizes these material traces of the first contacts in the Central Andes from a bioarchaeological perspective, such as the (lack of) evidence for epidemic disease, aberrant and hybrid mortuary treatment, and perimortem trauma.These examples are compared to the growing corpus of research on the bioarchaeology of colonialism from the coast of Peru and then discussed in relation to the legacy of colonialism.This paper takes a literal interpretation of "first contacts," noting that contact, conquest, and colonialism were fluid, dynamic and ongoing processes.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Worlds Forever Changed: The Impact of Conflict and Colony in the "New World"   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage