Landscape, Labor, and the Production of Difference in Colonial Peru: Indios and Negros in the Zaña Valley, 16th through 18th centuries C.E.

Summary

Historians and historical anthropologists have long suggested that racial and ethnic categories in the Spanish colonial Americas were discursively produced. But it is only recently that historical archaeologists have begun to chart the roles that household practices, economic transactions, and settlement configurations played in their emergence and reproduction. Archaeological excavations and documentary research on sites in Peru’s Zaña valley provide new perspectives on how indianess and blackness emerged over the course of nearly three centuries of colonial rule, in tandem with major transformations in the organization of land and labor in the valley. I bring together discussion of colonial initiatives, including settlement planning and financial administration, with evidence of interaction between people of native and African descent, to trace a genealogy of race and social identity in the viceroyalty.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Multi-Directional Colonialism: Approaches to Studying Global Interactions

Keywords

Spatial Coverage