Alluvium and Empire: The Archaeology of Colonial Resettlement and Indigenous Persistence on Peru's North Coast

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...