Colonial Agrarianism: A Historical Archaeology Of Land And Labor In Cusco, Peru

This dissertation examines the intertwined social and ecological consequences of colonialism by tracing processes of agricultural transformation at the Inka royal estate of Ollantaytambo, in the Cusco region of Peru, during the century and a half that followed the 1532 Spanish invasion of the Inka Empire. At Ollantaytambo, the Inka built an immense anthropogenic landscape designed to produce and reproduce Inka power. In the sixteenth century, a diverse cast of historical actors—local Andean lords, aspirant Spanish landowners, erstwhile Inka elites, emerging ecclesiastic orders, colonial officials, local agriculturalists, introduced and native flora and fauna—transformed that landscape by creating the hacienda, a system of colonial landholding and agricultural production that endured into the twentieth century on a landscape built by the Inka to be inherently Inka.In this dissertation I frame the formation of the hacienda as a question of political ecology. I focus on the role of land—conceptualized as an active process deeply enmeshed with human social and political life, rather than an inert backdrop to human activity—and land use in the socio-historical process of hacienda formation. Two years of archaeological, archival, and paleoenvironmental fieldwork anchor my argument: the agroecology of the Ollantaytambo region was radically transformed during socio-historical processes rooted in colonialism, but the origins of these transformations should be traced through both Inka and Iberian histories of land governance and use. The hacienda realigned land in politics, but this process was structured by latent properties of the Inka landscape and shaped at every turn by a range of human and non-human agencies. As a result, land was not just governed differently under Inka and Spanish Colonial rule, it acted differently within the political ecology of colonial agricultural production. By tracing how the hacienda emerged at Ollantaytambo this dissertation demonstrates how the extended process of Spanish colonialism reverberated through Andean agroecologies for centuries.