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A personal narrative is presented which recalls the author's interactions with Los Lavadores, or the washers, people who wash cars for a living in the Andes Mountains of Peru, while conducting fieldwork as a survey engineer.

This essay reaches beyond traditional interpretations of the colonial significance of indigenous devotion to the Virgin Mary and exposes the vital role of ritual in the transculturation of Andean identity. Eleven known eighteenth-century Peruvian paintings of Our Lady of Cocharcas depict the titular sculpture of the Virgin, her sanctuary, and the pilgrimage devotion associated with her. Pilgrims have traveled for centuries, and continue to travel today, in order to pay homage at Cocharcas. This analysis of the paintings of Our Lady of Cocharcas highlights an example of the localization of a religious image through the process of pilgrimage. Our Lady of Cocharcas attracted a variety of devotees, including regional political and religious authorities and ethnically mixed highlanders. In this article, I suggest a dominant local agency in the process which “tolerated” or “suppressed” both pre-conquest and Christian religious practices, founding a powerful colonial ritual used by many different constituents. The multiplicity of the participants produced an equal variety of responses to the colonial Andean divinity; however, it also provided the forum for articulating a unified community of Spanish colonial subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although archaeologists have become increasingly interested in disaster, collapse and regeneration, there has been insufficient attention paid to the social and psychological impact of disasters. Disasters can stimulate far-reaching religious changes. This article is a case study of the fall of the Middle Sicán polity of northern Peru (ad900–1100) that draws on both archaeology and oral tradition. Middle Sicán cosmology was centred on the Sicán Deity, which did not survive the politys collapse. The gods demise and the revitalization movement that followed the Middle Sicán can only be understood by considering both how many of the people of the region conceptualized their world and the disasters that occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]