Ideological Infrastructures and Bio-Political Ecology: Investigating Colonial-Era Entanglements of New Food and Religious Systems (Sixteenth Century, Ayacucho, Peru)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

ThThe extended Spanish conquest of Indigenous groups in the sixteenth century prompted infrastructural collisions of governance, foodways, and religious ideologies that indelibly altered Indigenous physical and ritual landscapes. Through the entanglement of new European foods and animals (wheat, horse, pig, and cow) with traditional Andean foodstuffs (maize, camelids, and guinea pig), diverse Andean religious communities decided what to eat based on access to goods, personal preference, and ideological alignment. The 1560s Taki Onqoy (Quechua: “singing/dancing sickness”) movement shaped some of these choices—weary of the spread of illnesses and death, Taki Onqoy practitioners strategically rejected European foods to avoid bodily sickness. This presentation explores the (often unintended) ideological, biological, and political ramifications of adoptions and rejections of specific European and indigenous foods through faunal remains at the Taki Onqoy center of Iglesiachayoq (Ayacucho, Peru).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37357.0