Indigenous Miners and the Making of the Andean Markets in Colonial Huancavelica

Summary

The mercury mines of Huancavelica have often been described through two familiar discourses in the colonial narrative, the European pursuit of wealth through extractive industries, and the simultaneous destruction of indigenous Andean communities through brutal forced labor and the corrosive effects of the colonial market. While these two historiographical traditions contain a great deal of truth, they can minimize the role of indigenous Andeans in the creation of new economic networks that eventually came to dominate the markets that developed around colonial mining centers. Drawing on household excavations and compositional analysis of ceramics found at Santa Barbara, the central settlement for indigenous miners, this paper will examine how different types of vessels moved in and out of commercial spheres of exchange. This research suggests that rather than seeing the colonial political economy as a singular set of capitalist practices exported from Europe that eventually produced a unitary market, an archaeological approach indicates the development of multiple and overlapping exchange networks produced by indigenous labor through their relations with each other and colonial institutions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Markets and Capitalisms in Indigenous Societies in the Colonial Americas   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17551