Mounds, Mapudungun, and Chemamull: The War of Arauco, Slavery, and the formation of the Mapuche, 1535-1655

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In November 1542 King Charles I passed the “New Laws” outlawing Indigenous slavery in the Spanish Empire. Yet, the laws left legal justifications for enslaving indigenous peoples, most significantly “just war.” Thus the New Laws did not end the Indigenous slave trade but moved it from the core of the empire to its periphery; to places like present day Chile and Argentina, where over a hundred years of intermittent conflict, known as the War of Arauco, produced an exceptional number of indigenous slaves.

But the conflict and slave trade did more than provide Indigenous slaves. It also brought Aracucanian groups together. Fighting against the Spanish they became the Mapuche. This paper traces the evolution of the Mapuche using both documentary evidence from the Archivo General de Indias alongside material and landscape sources, including unique Mapuche cultural identifiers such as mounds, chemamull funerary statues, and the adoption of mapudungun.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2023 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow