Anti-Colonialism, State Development, and Araucanian Resilience in the South-Central Andes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This presentation centers on indigenous proto-state or polity formation in the early Spanish period in the south-central Andes and the sociocultural conditions that shaped a specific type of archaeological record, an unostentatious material culture for a polity-level of society. The historical focus is on the Araucanians or Mapuche in the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries, when they successfully resisted nearly all engagement with the Spanish for more than 250 years. The Araucanian polity is an interesting case for several reasons: it was comprised of locally and regionally hierarchically nested parts made up of patriarchical elite and non-elite grassroot levels and complementary sacred and domestic areas; it employed a dynastic teleoscopic patrilineal structure to politically managed its administrative growth and development; and it manufactured standardized and generally unostentatious architecture, symbols, and material goods to effectively manage the rapid incorporation of fragmented groups into a new indigenous state. The new state required explicit social interactions and engagement with ideological, ceremonial, and warring worlds, a process that not only "made" individual subjects, but "made" the society and its reconstituted communities, and eventually "made" the polity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23029