Colonial Demography and Bioarchaeology

Summary

A growing body of bioarchaeological research into the biocultural effects of Spanish colonialism on native Andean communities shows that traditional and popular narratives emphasizing the roles of epidemic disease and Spanish military superiority in the conquest of the Inca Empire are oversimplified. In this poster, I synthesize recent bioarchaeological research from different sites in Peru that has interrogated the intricacies and etiologies of native mortality and depopulation, differential fertility, migration, and population recovery, as well as successful native adaptation and mortuary practices. New scholarship has yielded some compelling results about the entangled lives of Andeans, Spaniards, and Africans under colonial rule. These new works confirm the truism that bioarchaeological interpretation is much richer when the bioarchaeological lines of evidence are complemented and accompanied by other lines of archaeological data. The florescence of research in historical archaeology in the Central Andes holds promise for future bioarchaeological research and in this poster I also detail some directions and avenues for future research

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): 21037