Alluvium and Empire

There are many layers to this book, which at its core focuses on the late sixteenth-century reducción resettlement campaign in the Andes. The colonial Spanish administration directed the relocation of at least 1.4 million Indigenous Andeans from dispersed villages to more concentrated towns where they could more easily be monitored, indoctrinated, and exploited. Parker VanValkenburgh contributes to recent scholarship that views one of the most expansive forced resettlement campaigns in history as not just an event but a longer-term, negotiated, and nonlinear process. Most originally, he also argues that reducción created a discourse that Indigenous people invoked throughout the colonial period. VanValkenburgh traces the process and discourse of reducción across hundreds of years and contextualizes it far deeper into the past. To do so he relies on nearly a decade of archaeological and historical research, including his work with the Proyecto Arqueológico Zaña Colonial's pedestrian survey in the lower Zaña valley (encompassing 150 square kilometers), more intensive localized surveys, several seasons of excavation at a few select sites, artifact analysis, and his own archival research in Peru and Spain.For a long time, research on reducción, using the most accessible imperial sources, emphasized either its successes or failures. Following the work of his mentor Steve Wernke and others, VanValkenburgh combines archaeological work, archival research, and spatial analysis to reveal a localized, fuller image of reducción. The heart of this work is his study of the actual process and long afterlife of reducción for the Zaña valley. Chapter 4 provides a highly localized study of a few sites of reducción in the valley. Reducción inflicted “slow violence” on coastal peoples via social and environmental degradation, exacerbating the damage from earlier waves of warfare and disease. This helps explain why the region suffered the steepest colonial-era population decline for the greater Andes.Chapter 5 demonstrates that although the people of the Zaña valley had abandoned their reducción towns by 1650, the idea of reducción continued to shape their lives. Locals built new towns modeled on the reducciones and continued articulating their relationship with Spanish imperial power via the language of improvement so prevalent in reducción-era documentation. The rigor and precision of VanValkenburgh's analysis in these chapters are evident in his spatial analysis. He maps, for instance, settlement distribution over time, the scatter of ceramic shards across individual sites, population distributions, land use, land cover, the probable routes of no-longer-visible roads and canals, and historical agricultural productivity (based on cloud cover and soil salinity).Alluvium and Empire arrives to the actual establishment of reducción in the Zaña valley slowly. The opening chapter traces various academic approaches to empire by historians and archaeologists. VanValkenburgh then defines his own approach to empire. Through “landscape genealogy,” he examines the connection between domestic life, imperial decrees, “and seasonal cycles of rain and wind, the occasionally violent movement of tectonic plates, and the often devastating and unpredictable spread of disease” (p. 50). The second chapter charts the intellectual history of colonial Spanish reducción, which according to VanValkenburgh involved the resettlement and attempted “improvement” of Indigenous peoples. The third chapter narrates the Zaña valley's long-term environmental and human history as one context in which reducción was attempted. Before the Spanish invasion, the valley's Indigenous inhabitants developed flexible settlement patterns, constructed portable architecture, and lived in areas best suited to accommodate the region's “cyclical violence of water and alluvium” (p. 85). Those seeking to better understand the Peruvian north coast's strange history will find much value in this chapter and the subsequent two covering the postinvasion period. This region, after all, is central to the maritime foundations of Andean civilization hypothesis and is home to perhaps the earliest urban centers in the Americas. Yet it is also the epicenter of devastating Indigenous population decline.Alluvium and Empire beckons for a layered reading approach. The opening chapters, which delve deep into academic debates, intellectual histories, and methodological approaches for the study of empire and reducción, will be a valuable starting point for scholars researching and teaching these topics for Latin America. However, the book is at its best when it sets aside these intellectual histories to vividly describe the relationship between empire, people, place, and “water, wind, and sediment” in the Zaña valley (p. 18). I found VanValkenburgh's discussions of the relationship between labor, sedimentation, and location along irrigation networks to be especially enlightening. Found in the richly illustrated chapters 4 and 5, this analysis demonstrates how empire was negotiated within specific places' longer-term environmental histories.I do wonder if the book buries the importance of these contributions. The book's principal stated goal is to “illustrate how Spanish empire gained a grip in the Zaña valley and how Indigenous people dealt with it” (p. 16). Beginning the book's story in the valley and then inserting discussion of the intellectual genealogies of empire and reducción as needed would have brought the book's contributions to the fore. Nonetheless, Alluvium and Empire is a deeply researched, highly interdisciplinary, and richly woven tale of a region's resilient people. It is a testament to how they have creatively adapted to and survived the fluctuations of water, winds, sediment, empire, and resettlement across thousands of years. It should be essential reading for scholars of reducción, Peru's north coast, and the local environmental manifestations of empire in Indigenous America

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Empire · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Political science · Relocation · Scholarship · History · Latin American history and culture · Law

• Indigenous labor and the circulation of majolica in the colonial Andes

  Open Access•Douglas K Smit, Parker Vanvalkenburgh•Journal of Archaeological Science…•2023

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