Connecting the Pre-Columbian Past to the Present in South Coastal Peru: The Archaeology of the Colonial and Republican Haciendas of Nasca

Summary

The fertile desert middle-valleys of South Coastal Peru’s Grande Basin offered resources for great productive potential which supported a large population since the Formative Period and attracted intense agro-industrial interests during Spanish colonization. Historical archaeology offers tools for understanding regional processes of population replacement, highland/coastal exchange and migration, and the radical transformation of social processes during the last five centuries of intense manipulation by Western power, connecting the pre-Columbian past to the ethnographic present. Although indigenous populations in the basin, and particularly in the Ingenio and Grande Valleys, were replaced by mestizos and afro-Andeans, pre-Hispanic sacred sites, settlements, and irrigation technologies continued to be used and modified. This paper makes the case that a better understanding of both pre-Hispanic and historical contexts in the region must consider an integrated diachronic approach which takes into account the early and later use histories of sites and technological apparati.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• From Foragers to Empires: Recent Research on the South Coast of Peru

Keywords

Spatial Coverage