Parker VanValkenburgh

This paper analyzes remotely sensed data sources to evaluate land-use history within the Peruvian department of Amazonas and demonstrates the utility of comparing present and past land-use patterns using continuous datasets, as a complement to the often dispersed and discrete data produced by archaeological and paleoecological field studies. We characterize the distribution of ancient (ca. AD 1–1550) terracing based on data drawn from high-resolution satellite imagery and compare it to patterns of deforestation between 2001 and 2019, based on time-series Landsat data. We find that the patterns reflected in these two datasets are statistically different, indicating a distinctive shift in land-use, which we link to the history of Inka and Spanish colonialism and Indigenous depopulation in the 15th through 17th centuries AD as well as the growth of road infrastructure and economic change in the recent past. While there is a statistically significant relationship between areas of ancien...

This study presents the results of visual and portable X-ray fluorescence (PXRF) analyses of botijas/olive jars from the 16th Century sites of San Miguel de Piura and Carrizales, north coast Peru. Although visual analysis generally enabled the discrimination of Spanish- from New World-made sherds, PXRF analyses permitted further provenance determinations to specific regions and countries of origin. The results show that botijas from these sites variously derive from Spain, Panama and South America, with only Spanish sherds present at the church contexts under study in San Miguel de Piura. At Carrizales, Spanish botijas are abundant across church and domestic associated spaces, with only slightly higher concentrations recovered from church-affiliated contexts, and Panamanian and South American sherds also present. These results suggest that numerous economic, socio-religious and political factors were at play in the use and potential re-use of botijas at these sites. First 50 days free download link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Zfr0,rVDBRdhZ

Big data have arrived in archaeology, in the form of both large-scale datasets themselves and in the analytics and approaches of data science. Aerial data collected from satellite-, airborne- and UAV-mounted sensors have been particularly transformational, allowing us to capture more sites and features, over larger areas, at greater resolution, and in formerly inaccessible landscapes. However, these new means of collecting, processing, and visualizing datasets also present fresh challenges for archaeologists. What kinds of questions are these methods suited to answer, and where do they fall short? How do they articulate with the work of collecting smaller scale and lower resolution data? How are our relationships with “local” communities impacted by working at the scales of entire provinces, nation-states, and continents? This themed issue seeks to foster a conversation about how the unprecedented expansion of archaeological site detection, the globalization of archaeological data structures and databases, and the use of high-resolution aerial datasets are changing both the way archaeologists envision the past and the way we work in the present. In our introduction to the issue, presented here, we outline a series of conceptual and ethical issues posed by big data approaches in archaeology and provide an overview of how the nine essays that comprise this volume each address them.

I reflect on how the series of essays in this themed issue map out an emerging orientation in Andeanist archaeology, the transconquest perspective. Growing out of scholars' engagements with the local dimensions of Inka and Spanish rule and the methodological and ontological divides that distinguish "history" and "prehistory," the transconquest perspective attends to the affective connections that constitute polities and shape imperial transitions. I discuss its development, consider the ways in which these articles manifest it, and suggest two directions in which the transconquest perspective is pointing Andeanist and other historical archaeologies.

Resumen Desde inicios del siglo XX, los arqueólogos andinistas hemos hecho uso frecuente de las fuentes etnohistóricas y etnográficas para añadir detalles narrativos, estructurales y procesuales a nuestras descripciones del pasado. Sin embargo, no hemos prestado suficiente atención a las relaciones semióticas entre textos, sitios y artefactos arqueológicos, es decir, los modos en que estos dos medios reflejan y construyen a la realidad de maneras distintas. En este ensayo, examino los paisajes y lugares que surgieron a través del reasentamiento forzado en los valles de Zaña y Chamán, en la región Costa Norte del Perú, a fines del siglo XVI d.C. Al hacerlo, presento varias ideas sobre cómo podemos repensar la comparación y síntesis de la evidencia textual y arqueológica en el estudio del pasado andino. En concreto, llamo atención sobre las dimensiones per-formativas de las reducciones y las visitas, subrayando el papel que desempeñaron en el proceso de la etnogénesis colonial.

Abstract PRODUCING CHERREPE: REDUCCIÓN, ETHNICITY, AND PERFORMANCE IN THE ZAÑA AND CHAMÁN VALLEYS, XVI AND XVII CENTURIES Since the early 20th century, Andeanist archaeologists have made frequent use of ethnohistoric and ethnographic sources to add narrative, structural, and processual detail to our descriptions of past worlds. However, we have paid insufficient attention to the semiotic relationships between texts and archaeological sites – i.e., how both of these sets of media reflect and construct reality in distinct ways. In this essay, I examine sites and landscapes that emerged through forced resettlement in the lower Zaña and Chamán valleys, in Peru's north coast region, during the late 16th century AD. In doing so, I present several ideas about how we might rethink the comparison and synthesis of textual and archaeological evidence in the study of the Andean past. Specifically, I call attention to the performative dimensions of both reducción sites and visita documents and underscore their role in colonial ethnogenesis.

In this paper, I explore the politics of memory during the Toledan reforms—a series of ambitious administrative changes legislated in colonial Peru between 1569 and 1581, by viceroy Francisco de Toledo. At the center of Toledo's project was an initiative to resettle the entire native population of the audiencias of Lima and Charcas into a series of planned towns called reducciones. This movement—reducción—sought to transform Andean indigenous peoples into subjects of the Catholic Church and the Spanish crown through a series of explicitly spatial operations, including regional population nucleation and settlement planning. But the terms of these changes were also temporal: as reducción shaped landscapes and built environments, it also sought to transform indigenous historicity, bringing native peoples into the Era of Christ and carefully regulating the social institutions and practices by which they accounted for their pasts. The Toledan reforms therefore present a clear example of one empire's attempts to subjugate conquered peoples through mnemonic practices. Yet archaeological research in one corner of the viceroyalty—Peru's Zaña valley—suggests that the story of how indigenous memories were actually shaped during the course of resettlement and its aftermath was far from straightforward. To understand these transformations , I argue that we must explore not only the short-term dialectic of Spanish designs and their indigenous responses, but also the Bafterlives^ of reduccion in the 17th and 18th centuries. Over the longer term, reducción achieved staying power through a series of unanticipated pathways, in which landscape change, demography, and indigenous agency all played essential roles. I argue that these developments ultimately resulted in much more complex forms of remembering than those implicit in reducción legislation and that they underscore the importance for archaeological studies of memory of attending both to the materiality of imperial landscapes and long-term processes of subject formation.

This dissertation examines transformations in the political landscapes of 16th and 17th century colonial Peru, focusing in particular on the effects of the reducción forced resettlement movement on native communities in the Zaña and Chamán valleys of Peru's North Coast region. Based on archaeological settlement survey, excavations, geophysical survey, artifact analysis and archival research, I explore how reducción impacted indigenous political subjectivities, lifeways, and built environments within the Zaña/Chamán region.

In my analysis, I describe reducción as both a movement (primarily initiated under the watch of Peru's fifth viceroy, Francisco de Toledo) that had immediate effects on social and material life in the Zaña and Chamán valleys and as a field of discourse that extended well beyond those practical moments. In turn, I demonstrate how reducción discourse grew out of diverse strands of Classical and Early Modern thought, but also critically responded to Spanish clerical and administrative perception of New World built environments and landscapes.

Based on archaeological survey data, I argue that the Toledan reducción movement had profound effects on settlement systems in the lower Zaña and Chamán valleys, leading to a drastic increase in settlement nucleation and contributing to indigenous population decline. In tandem, reducción transformed native political affiliations from a series of nested political hierarchies into residentially based affiliations that proved incredibly resilient during nearly three centuries of colonial rule -- outlasting even the lives of individual reducción settlements themselves.

Based on test excavations, geophysical survey, and three-dimensional mapping at colonial sites within the project area, I also note significant variations in the form of reducción settlements within the Zaña/Chamán region. I argue that these variations represent the modification of site plans by both Spanish and native actors and reflect the exigencies of Christian conversion, economic exploitation, and cultural survival. Moreover, I demonstrate how new burial traditions and forms of domestic offerings found in reducción settlements in the Zaña and Chamán valleys reflect novel forms of cultural production. Ultimately, I argue that that the story of reducción in the Zaña/Chamán region was neither one of straightforward colonial domination nor tidy negotiation between colonial officials and indigenous subjects. Rather, it was a fractious process that led to unanticipated rearticulations of discourse and practice, which were shaped by local conditions of possibility, improvisation, and contradiction.

Maps do not merely represent reality; they both create and exceed it. This course critically examines the history and future of cartography, devoting particular attention to the role that maps and map-making have played in the emergence and persistence of social power and political imagination. Among other topics, we consider how maps have shaped (and are shaped by) property and class relations; state sovereignty and royal authority; colonialism and imperialism; national and ethnic identities; and the relationship between humankind and nature, earth and the cosmos.

In the 21st Century, digital tools are as integral to the
practice of archaeological research as the trowel and the
field notebook. This course combines training in essential digital applications for archaeology
with critical discussions of the impact of digital methods on the conceptual dimensions of
archaeological research design and practice. Topics include topographic survey, GNSS, tabletbased
field-data recording systems, database design, digital photogrammetry, and
intermediate techniques in archaeological Geographic Information Systems. Demonstrated
proficiency in ArcGIS or open-sourced GIS software (the equivalent of an introductory course,
preferably Anthropology 1201) and previous archaeological field experience are prerequisites.

Course Description: For much of our history, anthropologists in general (and anthropological archaeologists in particular) have been predominantly concerned with studying how societies change over time. Since the " spatial turn " of the last decades of the 20th century and the first of the 21 st , however, space has become one of the key foci of scholarship in anthropology and many corollary social sciences, leading to the production of a diverse, expansive, and ambitious literature on the subject. This seminar charts a course through that literature, focusing in particular on the political production of space – from the scale of bodies, to cities, states, and international systems. The course is divided into three units. In the first five weeks of the term, we will engage with a series of key readings on the ontology and epistemology of space, place and landscape and consider questions that are central to their study – namely, what are these things, and how should we make sense of them? More specifically, how is it that space is produced, experienced, and politicized? After establishing our conceptual foundations and surveying a range of different approaches, we will move on to examine the politics of space at different scales and read three recent monographs that employ quite different lenses to make sense of spatial dilemmas in their respective areas of study – Smith's The Political Machine, Shabazz's Spatializing Blackness, and Weizman's Hollow Land. Having covered analytics and a series of case studies, we'll finish the course with a final unit critical cartography. Here, we'll examine how maps mediate social and political relations and consider techniques and interventions for capturing space's complexity in the digital age.