A Failure of Imagination: North Coast Peruvian Irrigation under Spanish Colonial Rule

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Failure" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ethnohistoric documents describe the north coast as a verdant, irrigated landscape at the time of Spanish conquest; yet, only a few decades later, colonial archives are filled with legal disputes over water rights, water shortages, and the desertification of farmland. Cataclysmic demographic collapse caused by the introduction of European diseases accounts for some system degradation in those early years. However, archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence suggests that a failure of imagination might also be to blame. Failure is defined as a mismatch between intended outcome and actual outcome, and it often occurs due to a misunderstanding of the nature of the problem being addressed. This paper argues that a fundamental misreading of the north coast environment underlies the many “small-f” failures that plagued the Spanish colonial farming system (many of which persist, even today). It presents three examples that exemplify this misreading: (1) a prehispanic canal “designed to fail,” (2) a prehispanic dam feature designed to leak, and (3) a twentieth-century account of a canal branch designed to be flooded. These cases demonstrate that prehispanic and autochthonous, modern-era water management infrastructure targeted elements of the north coast environment ignored or misunderstood by colonial farmers.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of Failure   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39362.0