The Witching Hour: Demonization of Female Bodies and the (mis)Construction of Gender during the Spanish Evangelization of Huarochirí (Lima, Peru)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1660, Francisca Melchora, widow of the lord of the Huarochirí people in the Viceroyalty of Peru, became immersed in a witchcraft criminal case. However, she was not accused of being a witch herself, but instead of hiding accused women and resisting a Spanish lieutenant sent to arrest her. What follows in the written account of this case were testimonies in which women and men incriminated each other by identifying rituals, sacred places, and associations between alleged witches as community leaders. What is compelling about the case is that the women, though simplified as witches by the Spanish authorities, were recognized as counselors to the deceased local lord, and were considered powerful enough to be renowned beyond the boundaries of their small towns. In this presentation, I examine colonial written records and archaeological data to investigate the ritual paraphernalia, places, and activities that identified the so-called witches. I propose that while female bodies were demonized as dangerous, lustful and sinful by the Spanish Catholic clergy, the accounts from Huarochirí demonstrate that gender was not considered in such limited terms by Andean ritual practices, and that women were powerful political actors that held similar status to their male counterparts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25618