Ceramic Production in the Colonial Moquegua Valley

Summary

Recent scholarship demonstrates a growth in archaeological analysis of Spanish colonial reducciónes (which is the resettlement of several small villages into one larger Spanish controlled town) in Andean South America. Critical to understanding the impact of reducciones on indigenous populations is examining the ways in which the production and circulation of craft goods was reworked with Spanish conquest. In characterizing the elemental composition of archaeological pottery, Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) is an invaluable tool in examining resource procurement as well as long distance exchange in the past. In this paper, I report new data derived from LA-ICP-MS analyses of two sites in the Moquegua Valley, Peru: Torata Alta and Sabaya. Both sites were founded during Inca control of the valley but were also occupied into the seventeenth century and have strong Spanish colonial components. Analyzed samples included early colonial Period ceramics that were excavated from two structures identified as indigenous (Van Buren 1993) at Torata Alta and two structures at Sabaya. Comparing the data with the existing ICPMS data base on locally available clays, I examine differential resource procurement as well as access to imported goods among indigenous and Spanish communities in early colonial Moquegua.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Colonial Encounters in the Prehispanic Andes

Keywords

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