Landscapes of Mobility in the South-Central Andes: From Chiefly Networks to Colonial Markets (AD 1100–1800)

Summary

The great silver mining centers of Potosí, Porco, and Oruro in the Bolivian highlands have long formed an important focus for understanding the Spanish colonial world, both for the colonial imagination and for the contemporary historian. In comparison with the contexts of production and exchange based around these mining centers, however, their wider contexts of mobility and logistics within the altiplano and the valleys leading west to the Pacific coast have been comparatively under-investigated by historians and archaeologists alike. This presentation considers these peripheral and ‘interstitial’ landscapes and the communities they constituted (particularly as they articulated with prehispanic legacies of mobility and infrastructure) within the context of ongoing research in southern Peru and northern Chile. The resulting discussion highlights some of the ongoing tensions between multiple scales of analysis and between textual and archaeological sources of historical data.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22516