Mirages of the State: Maritime Landscapes of Southern Peru at the Beginning of the Republic, 1821-1879

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The intersection of trade regulation and geopolitical reconfigurations that followed Independence from Spain in 1821 gave the Peruvian coasts new importance in the Post-Colonial Period. Global commodity trade was an inherently maritime endeavor and aided in the consolidation of a new oceanic world in the Pacific basin during the mid-nineteenth century. Importantly in the case of Peru, the first boom-and-bust cycle of the Republic was bird guano from the nearby Pacific islands. The ports, coves and other coastal areas gained new importance as the country’s political economy underwent a maritime turn. In this paper, I employ a landscapes perspective and build on archaeological, cartographic and documentary data to understand this maritime turn as it unfolded along the southern coast. This region, which today spans southern Peru and northern Chile, experienced a faster post-independence economic recovery than the rest of the country in good part due to its links to foreign traders. As it is shown here, the southern ports became loci of contestation were the pulses of capitalism took local form, notions of power and authority were reformulated, and national belonging took new meanings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23927