Di Hu

www.escholarship.org/uc/item/50k7d493 THEN DIG Peer-reviewed archaeology blogging Memories of haunted places: An Andean village after the violence In the small Andean village of Pomatambo, ruined adobe houses stand next to new brick ones. Decay and renewal dot the landscape just as people are struggling to balance painful memories of war and loss with new optimism for community unity. Landscape and place activate certain memories of the past and aspirations for the future in Pomatambo. Pomatambo, a village of about two hundred people, is nestled high in the Andes in the province of Vilcashuaman. The Vilcashuaman area was at the epicenter of a civil war in the 1980s and 1990s. During the violence, over a third of the villagers abandoned Pomatambo. Every family in Pomatambo lost at least a member during these years, and abandoned houses and memorials mark where people lost their lives. http://arf.berkeley.edu/then­dig/2011/06/memories­of­haunted­places­an­andean­village­after­the­viol...

Inka imperial policies reorganized the social and labor landscapes of their subjects on a grand scale and unprecedented degree in the Americas. The two most numerous categories of resettled laborers created by these imperial policies were the mitmaqkuna and yanakuna, who together represented at least a third of the total subject population. The Inkas resettled them, often far from their homelands. They were responsible for the daily provisioning of Inka settlements and keeping the peace among conquered populations. Despite their central role in Inka state consolidation and economy, we know little about these populations outside of ethnohistorical interpretations of their privileged status relative to normal tribute-paying communities. Because ethnohistoric documents were written with Inka and Spanish state interests in mind, archaeological evidence is crucial to evaluate their lived experiences. We compare the ethnohistoric and archaeological evidence of the lives of the mitmaqkuna ...

Link for free download in the next 50 days: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1WQMQ,rVDBK0So Perhaps the most ambitious social policy carried out by the Incas, the mitmaq program resettled one third to one quarter of subject populations for the purposes of control and producing for the state. Ethnohistoric sources suggest that the relocated people, called mitmaqkuna, were given access to fertile lands and enjoyed elevated social status and freedoms bestowed to them by the Incas. Until now, these claims have not been tested with archaeological evidence. This paper evaluates the ethnohistoric claims through the geochemical analysis of 84 obsidian artifacts from a probable mitmaqkuna agricultural labor colony called Yanawilka, located in Vilcashuamán province, Peru. There is evidence that access to obsidian was restricted for the inhabitants of Yanawilka. The obsidian was mostly from the Quispisissa source, but the relative scarcity, small flake size, and evidence for conservation of raw material suggests that access to this high-quality source was limited and not due to direct procurement.

The Inca mitmaq policy ambitiously resettled up to one-third of its subject population. Despite the importance of this mass relocation, we know little of the mitmaqkuna, the people resettled under the policy. Through a spatial analysis of Yanawilka, an agricultural mitmaq settlement near the Inca provincial capital of Vilcashuamán, this article explores how Inca imperial control differentially affected various aspects of the mitmaqkuna's social landscapes. The use of space syntax analysis to assess the centrality of the Inca imperial presence within such settlements may be of value for assessing other imperial contexts around the world.

Link for free download in the next 50 days: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1WQMQ,rVDBK0So
Perhaps the most ambitious social policy carried out by the Incas, the mitmaq program resettled one third to one quarter of subject populations for the purposes of control and producing for the state. Ethnohistoric sources suggest that the relocated people, called mitmaqkuna, were given access to fertile lands and enjoyed elevated social status and freedoms bestowed to them by the Incas. Until now, these claims have not been tested with archaeological evidence. This paper evaluates the ethnohistoric claims through the geochemical analysis of 84 obsidian artifacts from a probable mitmaqkuna agricultural labor colony called Yanawilka, located in Vilcashuamán province, Peru. There is evidence that access to obsidian was restricted for the inhabitants of Yanawilka. The obsidian was mostly from the Quispisissa source, but the relative scarcity, small flake size, and evidence for conservation of raw material suggests that access to this high-quality source was limited and not due to direct procurement.

Recently, interest in the archaeology of ethnogenesis has surged. This renewed interest stems from innovations in the historical study of ethnogenesis, theoretical shifts favoring multidirectional agency, and relevant contemporary sociopolitical debates. Theoretical problems surrounding the appropriateness of the social science concept of “ethnicity,” however, have made the comparative study of ethnogenesis difficult. Drawing from past and emergent perspectives adds renewed vigor to comparative studies of ethnogenesis. A methodology that integrates the different types of theory can resolve the theoretical tensions in the archaeological study of ethnogenesis.

This paper will focus on how Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have been applied in Landscape Archaeology from the late 1980s to the present. GIS, a tool for organising and analysing spatial information, has exploded in popularity, but we still lack a systematic overview of how it has contributed to archaeological theory, specifically Landscape Archaeology. This paper will examine whether and how GIS has advanced archaeological theory through a historical review of its application in archaeology.

This project traced the evolution of multi-community polity formation in the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia, before and during the rise of the Tiwanaku state through the analysis of projectile points recovered by the Taraco Archaeological Project.

Historians of the late colonial Andes focus on this time period as a watershed for innovations in identity, resistance, and economics that famously culminated in the great Andean rebellions of the 1780s. Strangely, there has been little investigation of the role that material culture played in such transitions. This paper will briefly review some of the archaeological and historical evidence from an important textile workshop, Pomacocha, in highland Peru. Such evidence suggests that changes in the experience of materiality and social cohesion helped paved the way for revolt.

Early paradigms of Andean culture change emphasized continuity
and the timelessness of the ethnographic present. More recently,
while historians have realized that profound changes occurred
from the late pre-Hispanic period to the present in the native
Andes, the common themes in the changes in the materiality of
language, landscape, and lithics in the colonial Andes have been
understudied from an archaeological point of view. In this paper, I
will outline some of the major changes in the materiality of
Quechua, of the relationship between landscape and architecture,
and of the use of lithics from the early colonial period to the
present. The main focus will be of case studies from central and
south-central Peru.

A cursory inspection of the Inka acllawasi and the Spanish obraje points to many similarities. They were controlled spaces primarily for the production of textiles. Both spaces functioned as institutions for religious and political indoctrination. This paper will examine both institutions through architectural, archaeological and documentary evidence to see whether the organization of production and control was fundamentally similar or different. Such a comparison will shed light on whether the Spanish regimes of labor, particularly those related to the production of textiles, represented a break or a continuation of the underlying principles of Inka labor organization.

I wrote a “choose your own adventure” in the colonial Andes to bring my dissertation research alive. The adventure will be from the perspective of a native Andean woman and help you understand a bit better what it was like to live during this time period. We often read about terrible working conditions, structural exploitation, racism in historical colonial regimes, but by putting us closer to “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes,” we can gain a better appreciation of the personal impacts of colonialism. Our adventure takes place in the Andean province called Vilcashuamán, a former provincial capital of the Inkas, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. During this time, textile workshops called obrajes (oh-bra-hays) were very profitable. The obrajes supplied cloth and blankets for markets all over the Andes, especially at the mines like the Potosí silver mine in Bolivia and the Huancavelica mercury mines in Peru. The colonial province of Vilcashuamán was one of the major centers of textile production in the colonial Andes. All of the scenarios presented, while fictional, are based on actual events, attitudes, and practices from the colonial Andes as reconstructed through archival documents and excavations.

A common assumption about warfare is that it is a necessary component of state formation. However, recent research in the southern Titicaca Basin showed a lack of inter-group violence and warfare during early multi-community polity formation, the precursor to state formation. We will discuss the evolution of multi-community polity formation in the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia, before and during the rise of the Tiwanaku state through the analysis of projectile points from the Taraco Archaeological Project. As Tiwanaku’s influence rose, the ceremonial centers of the Taraco peninsula declined in importance. Did Tiwanaku’s early rise involve violent expansion?

Why do the oppressed not rebel, especially when they outnumber their oppressors? What are the social conditions for armed rebellion? Should we be focusing on armed rebellion rather than other kinds of resistance? This dissertation examines these general questions about the nature of social movements in the context of Spanish colonialism. Specifically, it unpacks the long term social conditions that enabled the conjuncture of local armed revolts and regional-scale rebellions in the late colonial period (late eighteenth/early nineteenth century) in Peru through a combination of archaeological and historical evidence. The primary case study is a village called Pomacocha, located in Vilcashuamán province in the modern region of Ayacucho, Peru.
By putting an important case study “under the microscope,” we can examine how local social conditions influenced regional social conditions for revolt and vice versa. Pomacocha was intensely affected by both Inka and Spanish colonialism and provides rare insight into the lives of the people whose labor sustained the colonial regimes. It began as a transplanted colony of agriculturalists (mitmaqkuna) to supply food for the nearby Inka palace and the Inka provincial capital of Vilcashuamán (Willka Wamán). After the Spanish conquest, the agricultural settlement at Pomacocha was abandoned. Later, an hacienda-obraje was established and a new native community sprang up around it.  The area became a politically and economically important zone for the Spaniards. How did the materiality of social relations inform strategies of resistance by exploited laborers in the Andean village of Pomacocha? Historical documents attest to the poor working conditions and abuses at the textile workshop of Pomacocha during the Spanish colonial period, but no significant armed uprising occurred until after the Tupac Amaru II rebellion of 1781. To understand and contextualize the short-term and long-term causes of the late colonial upheaval, I analyze the long-term evolution of strategies of control and resistance at Pomacocha, starting with the Inka period. I combine archival research, archaeological excavations and surveys, analysis of material culture, surname analysis of censuses, and space syntax analysis to show that strategies of state control and bottom-up resistance coevolved from the Inka period, and that this coevolution resulted in a social landscape conducive to alliances across social groups in the late colonial period. 
There has been little archaeological work aimed at understanding the relationship between forms of resistance and the materiality of social relationships of coerced laborers in the Inka and Spanish colonial periods. By understanding the effect of Inka and Spanish colonial institutions of labor on identity and social cohesion, we gain a better understanding of the motivations, enabling social conditions, and strategies of resistance to such institutions. By taking a long-term view of how the workers of a single community negotiated strategies of control of labor, my dissertation fleshes out a typical case study of the interplay among local motivations and wider social context for general rebellion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.