Voices from Vilcabamba

Voices from Vilcabamba

Author: Brian S. Bauer

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2015-03-01

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1607324261

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A rich new source of important archival information, Voices from Vilcabamba examines the fall of the Inca Empire in unprecedented detail. Containing English translations of seven major documents from the Vilcabamba era (1536–1572), this volume presents an overview of the major events that occurred in the Vilcabamba region of Peru during the final decades of Inca rule. Brian S. Bauer, Madeleine Halac-Higashimori, and Gabriel E. Cantarutti have translated and analyzed seven documents, most notably Description of Vilcabamba by Baltasar de Ocampo Conejeros and a selection from Martín de Murúa’s General History of Peru, which focuses on the fall of Vilcabamba. Additional documents from a range of sources that include Augustinian investigations, battlefield reports, and critical eyewitness accounts are translated into English for the first time. With a critical introduction on the history of the region during the Spanish Conquest and introductions to each of the translated documents, the volume provides an enhanced narrative on the nature of European-American relations during this time of important cultural transformation.


Forms of Relation

Forms of Relation

Author: Matthew Goldmark

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2023-02-24

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0813949394

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Drawing on literary texts, conversion manuals, and colonial correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Peru, Forms of Relation shows the importance of textual, religious, and bureaucratic ties to struggles over colonial governance and identities. Goldmark analyzes these ties as forms of kinship forged outside of the well-studied paradigms of sex, biology, and procreation. He demonstrates how colonial actors—Spanish and Indigenous—vied for power when they argued that identity could be shaped by spiritual fatherhood, standardized education, or the regulation of doctrine. Forms of Relation illustrates why we must interrogate the dominant paradigms of mestizaje, heterosexuality, and biology that are too often left unchallenged in studies of Spanish colonialism, demonstrating how nonprocreative kinships shaped the Spanish colonial regime.


Reading the Illegible

Reading the Illegible

Author: Laura Leon Llerena

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2023-01-10

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0816547548

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Reading the Illegible examines the history of alphabetic writing in early colonial Peru, deconstructing the conventional notion of literacy as a weapon of the colonizer. This book develops the concept of legibility, which allows for an in-depth analysis of coexisting Andean and non-Native media. The book discusses the stories surrounding the creation of the Huarochirí Manuscript (c. 1598–1608), the only surviving book-length text written by Indigenous people in Quechua in the early colonial period. The manuscript has been deemed “untranslatable in all the usual senses,” but scholar Laura Leon Llerena argues that it offers an important window into the meaning of legibility. The concept of legibility allows us to reconsider this unique manuscript within the intertwined histories of literacy, knowledge, and colonialism. Reading the Illegible shows that the anonymous author(s) of the Huarochirí Manuscript, along with two contemporaneous Andean-authored texts by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, rewrote the history of writing and the notion of Christianity by deploying the colonizers’ technology of alphabetic writing. Reading the Illegible weaves together the story of the peoples, places, objects, and media that surrounded the creation of the anonymous Huarochirí Manuscript to demonstrate how Andean people endowed the European technology of writing with a new social role in the context of a multimedia society.


The Globe on Paper

The Globe on Paper

Author: Giuseppe Marcocci

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-07-02

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0192589571

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The age of exploration exposed the limits of available universal histories. Everyday interactions with cultures and societies across the globe brought to light a multiplicity of pasts which proved difficult to reconcile with an emerging sense of unity in the world. Among the first to address the questions posed by this challenge were a handful of Renaissance historians. On what basis could they narrate the history of hitherto unknown peoples? Why did the Bible and classical works say nothing about so many visible traces of ancient cultures? And how far was it possible to write histories of the world at a time of growing religious division in Europe and imperial rivalry around the world? A study of the cross-fertilization of historical writing in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, The Globe on Paper reconstructs a set of imaginative accounts worked out from Mexico to the Moluccas and Peru, and from the shops of Venetian printers to the rival courts of Spain and England. The pages of this book teem with humanists, librarians, missionaries, imperial officials, as well as forgers and indigenous chroniclers. Drawing on information gathered—or said to have been gathered—from eyewitness reports, interviews with local inhabitants, ancient codices, and material evidence, their global narratives testify to an unprecedented broadening of horizons which briefly flourished before succumbing to the forces of imperial and religious reaction.


Inka Bird Idiom

Inka Bird Idiom

Author: Claudia Brosseder

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2025-07-15

Total Pages: 757

ISBN-13: 0822989654

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From majestic Amazonian macaws and highland Andean hawks to tiny colorful tanagers and tall flamingos, birds and their feathers played an important role in the Inka empire. Claudia Brosseder uncovers the many meanings that Inkas attached to the diverse fowl of the Amazon, the eastern Andean foothills, and the highlands. She shows how birds and feathers shaped Inka politics, launched wars, and initiated peace. Feathers provided protection against unpredictable enemies, made possible communication with deities, and brought an imagined Inka past into a political present. Richly textured contexts of feathered objects recovered from Late Horizon archaeological records and from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts written by Spanish interlocutors enable new insights into Inka visions of interspecies relationships, an Inka ontology, and Inka views of the place of the human in their ecology. Inka Bird Idiom invites reconsideration of the deep intellectual ties that connected the Amazon and the mountain forests with the Andean highlands and the Pacific coast.


Inca Apocalypse

Inca Apocalypse

Author: R. Alan Covey

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-05-01

Total Pages: 593

ISBN-13: 0190299142

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A major new history of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, set in a larger global context than previous accounts Previous accounts of the fall of the Inca empire have played up the importance of the events of one violent day in November 1532 at the highland Andean town of Cajamarca. To some, the "Cajamarca miracle"-in which Francisco Pizarro and a small contingent of Spaniards captured an Inca who led an army numbering in the tens of thousands-demonstrated the intervention of divine providence. To others, the outcome was simply the result of European technological and immunological superiority. Inca Apocalypse develops a new perspective on the Spanish invasion and transformation of the Inca realm. Alan Covey's sweeping narrative traces the origins of the Inca and Spanish empires, identifying how Andean and Iberian beliefs about the world's end shaped the collision of the two civilizations. Rather than a decisive victory on the field at Cajamarca, the Spanish conquest was an uncertain, disruptive process that reshaped the worldviews of those on each side of the conflict.. The survivors built colonial Peru, a new society that never forgot the Inca imperial legacy or the enduring supernatural power of the Andean landscape. Covey retells a familiar story of conquest at a larger historical and geographical scale than ever before. This rich new history, based on the latest archaeological and historical evidence, illuminates mysteries that still surround the last days of the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas.


Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier

Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier

Author: Nicholas Q. Emlen

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0816541353

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Extraordinary change is under way in the Alto Urubamba Valley, a vital and turbulent corner of the Andean-Amazonian borderland of southern Peru. Here, tens of thousands of Quechua-speaking farmers from the rural Andes have migrated to the territory of the Indigenous Amazonian Matsigenka people in search of land for coffee cultivation. This migration has created a new multilingual, multiethnic agrarian society. The rich-tasting Peruvian coffee in your cup is the distillate of an intensely dynamic Amazonian frontier, where native Matsigenkas, state agents, and migrants from the rural highlands are carving the forest into farms. Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier shows how people of different backgrounds married together and blended the Quechua, Matsigenka, and Spanish languages in their day-to-day lives. This frontier relationship took place against a backdrop of deforestation, cocaine trafficking, and destructive natural gas extraction. Nicholas Q. Emlen’s rich account—which takes us to remote Amazonian villages, dusty frontier towns, roadside bargaining sessions, and coffee traders’ homes—offers a new view of settlement frontiers as they are negotiated in linguistic interactions and social relationships. This interethnic encounter was not a clash between distinct groups but rather an integrated network of people who adopted various stances toward each other as they spoke. The book brings together a fine-grained analysis of multilingualism with urgent issues in Latin America today, including land rights, poverty, drug trafficking, and the devastation of the world’s largest forest. It offers a timely on-the-ground perspective on the agricultural colonization of the Amazon, which has triggered an environmental emergency threatening the future of the planet.


Political Landscapes of Capital Cities

Political Landscapes of Capital Cities

Author: Jessica Joyce Christie

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2016-08-08

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1607324695

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Political Landscapes of Capital Cities investigates the processes of transformation of the natural landscape into the culturally constructed and ideologically defined political environments of capital cities. In this spatially inclusive, socially dynamic interpretation, an interdisciplinary group of authors including archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians uses the methodology put forth in Adam T. Smith’s The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities to expose the intimate associations between human-made environments and the natural landscape that accommodate the sociopolitical needs of governmental authority. Political Landscapes of Capital Cities blends the historical, political, and cultural narratives of capital cities such as Bangkok, Cusco, Rome, and Tehran with a careful visual analysis, hinging on the methodological tools of not only architectural and urban design but also cultural, historiographical, and anthropological studies. The collection provides further ways to conceive of how processes of urbanization, monumentalization, ritualization, naturalization, and unification affected capitals differently without losing grasp of local distinctive architectural and spatial features. The essays also articulate the many complex political and ideological agendas of a diverse set of sovereign entities that planned, constructed, displayed, and performed their societal ideals in the spaces of their capitals, ultimately confirming that political authority is profoundly spatial. Contributors: Jelena Bogdanović, Jessica Joyce Christie, Talinn Grigor, Eulogio Guzmán, Gregor Kalas, Stephanie Pilat, Melody Rod-ari, Anne Toxey, Alexei Vranich


Ancient Advanced Technology in South America

Ancient Advanced Technology in South America

Author: Norah Romney

Publisher: DTTV PUBLICATIONS

Published: 2021-02-13

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13:

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There are a host of ancient ruins in South America, claimed by the Inca, inherited by the Inca, conquered by the Inca and built by the Inca. Although one label has stuck on each monument or ancient site, it is clear there are many layers of construction, physically and conceptually. Academics and Scholars still debate who built these, monuments, did they inherit them? Was there a Pre-Inca culture, but everyone can appreciate how advanced the ‘Inca Ancient Ruins’ found in the highlands of South America. The Inca were largest empire ever seen in the Americas and the largest in the world at that time, yet doubt is cast on their monuments and origins. Tiahuanaco, a region of Bolivia that holds many remnants of ancient civilizations, demonstrates some of the most unique and amazingly precise examples of stonework in the world. The ancient people who created these walls and buildings used such a high degree of mathematical expertise that the workmanship is astounding even to modern day people. They marvel at how the stone-cutters from long ago created all of it with simple hand tools.The high plains of Peru and Bolivia in the Andes Mountains holds a wealth of historical sites, each one more amazing than the next. Scholars and archaeologists had only seen the same type of masonry in ancient Egypt before this. Although some historians call this Inca architecture, this later time period civilization had little to do with creating these fantastic structures. The Incas dominated this area from approximately the 13th to 14th centuries AD up until the time of the Spanish explorers' conquest of the region. Indeed, they built some magnificent structures, but the ones most interesting for their precision and longevity came from even older groups. Some of these empires were called the Wari and the Tiahuanaco. They existed hundreds or even thousands of years before the Inca came to power.Multiple historians who specialize in architectural studies have dedicated a lot of their time and knowledge to figuring out how ancient groups of people who did not use advanced tools or even the wheel could create such structures. The most advanced chisels and hammers of the time would have been created from copper, stone, and wood. With these simple hand tools, people dug granite, andesite, and porphyry out of quarries. After transporting them to the final locations, they then carved them with smooth precision so they would fit together almost seamlessly.What techniques could these ancient experts use to make such flat and smooth surfaces, exact angles, and joints that would not allow a single blade of grass to squeeze between? Historians can only guess about some of the methods that allowed for such unique stone cutting and building styles.