With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Jeffrey Quilter and an international team of colleagues will conduct a pilot project of archaeological and documentary research on the north coast of Peru at the ruins of an early Colonial Period (ca. 1560 - 1820) church and town, Santa Magdalena de Cao Viejo. The project combines U.S. and Peruvian specialists in field archaeology, advanced mapping techniques, documentary analysis, and other specialties to examine theories on social, economic, political, and other processes resulting from the imposition of a foreign regime, the Spanish, on native peoples.
The encounter of Europeans and Native Americans is one of the great epics of world history. While the events that took place are condemned as tragic by many it is indisputable that they were world-shaking, effecting the entire subsequent history in profound ways. Surprisingly, our knowledge of how encounter actually occurred is poor and underdeveloped, based mostly on the interpretations of Spanish writers and a few others who all had specific agendas in recording events. Such documentary sources, while valuable, only tell an incomplete story and reveal little of the day-to-day lives of Spanish and native, alike, as they worked through the painful processes of conversion, domination, resistance, and defiance. The excellent preservation qualities of the Peruvian desert, however, have yielded up evidence of the "small things forgotten" of every day life in preliminary work and thus this archaeological project will be able to offer a unique view of such processes.
The nature of the research questions to be investigated concern the degree to which Spanish and native in a local, specific setting conformed to the larger dictates of policy makers. As but one example, preliminary work suggests that the lay-out of the town and church complex did not conform to Spanish regulations but was adjusted to local conditions - the church was placed directly in front of a prehispanic temple that had been abandoned but was still venerated by local people. The project will explore this and other evidence of the degree to which Spaniard and native compromised the policies of distant authorities in order to find ways to live together. Were the native people in the town under heavy guard and was the settlement fortified or were conditions more flexible and open? Did Spanish priests allow the practice of native religions, to some degree, or was a strict enforcement of Christian practice maintained? To what degree was the local economy tied in to the larger economic system of the Spanish Empire and to what degree were native practices in agriculture and food-ways maintained? These and other questions will be addressed in the research.
The broader impacts of the study are that it will contribute significant information on how radically different cultures interacted. It will help to determine how accurate a picture the documentary sources are in relation to archaeological data. In our contemporary world in which the clash of cultures and values has become increasingly important this study of one of the great cultural confrontations of history may offer much to consider for our own times.
