Elite domestic spaces and daily life in a reduccion

Summary

The archaeology of Spanish colonialism in the Andean region is coming into increasing focus with the documentation of Spanish colonial doctrinas and reducciónes, along with the excavation of religious structures, public spaces, and elite and common indigenous households. However, we still lack a clear comparative diachronic perspective of how Spanish colonialism affected the daily lives and values of indigenous Andean peoples. This paper presents the results of the 2016 excavations of three large stone structures and two smaller associated structures in the Spanish colonial reducción of Santa Cruz de Tuti, in the Caylloma Province of Arequipa, Peru, occupied from the pre-Colonial era until its abandonment in 1843. We argue that these compounds comprise the domestic spaces of kurakas, local chiefly authorities in both pre-Colonial and Spanish colonial contexts. We present evidence that various of these spaces were in use from near the founding of the reducción in the late sixteenth century to its abandonment in the mid nineteenth century. As such, our excavations yield valuable comparative data on the domestic lives of the elite indigenous classes of Spanish Colonial Peru and their changing values, lifeways, and bodily habitus over the course of Spanish Colonialism and into the early Republican period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Archaeological Microhistory at a Planned Colonial Town in Highland Peru

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17044