A Wake of Change: Investigating Biocultural Interaction During the Early Colonial Period in the Central Andes, Peru

Summary

Burial practice in the Central Andes was transmitted continuously from the Middle Horizon (AD 700-AD 1000) onward, if not earlier in some areas, reflecting an agreed-upon understanding of Andean social identity throughout time. However, when the Spanish colonized the Andes, they drastically altered this continuity, forcing indigenous populations to bury their dead under the Church in idealized Catholic tradition. This sudden change in burial practice ruptured Andean identity as indigenous populations conformed, resisted or attempted to both maintain Andean identity while still act as good Catholics under Spanish control. At Iglesiachayoq (Ayacucho), an Inka settlement in the Chicha-Soras Valley of Peru, Andeans resisted this rupture of social identity through a subversive revitalization of traditional Andean landscape deities: a movement known as Taki Onqoy, (Quechua: Dancing Sickness). Using church burials excavated at Iglesiachayoq, we use mortuary and isotope analysis to address the question of changing social identities and the relationship between indigenous and imperial actors at the moment of contact. We find that participation in Taki Onqoy was likely fragmentary, and that church burials reflect both patterns of indigenous and Spanish cultural and religious tradition, indicating the negotiated and improvised nature of interaction and identity in the Early Colonial Period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Status and Identity in the Imperial Andes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15558