On a bus from Cochabamba to Sucre, one passes through the area of Mizque, a rugged region of mighty Andean foothills in eastern highland Bolivia. Except on its interior edge, which descends toward the lowland savanna, the area is dry. But rivers flow down the many valleys among the parallel ranges of the foothills, eventually finding their way to Amazonia. The watered, fertile floors of these valleys have, from the distant past to the present, offered fine agricultural opportunities, which Spanish colonists were quick to exploit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period with which this book is mostly concerned.
The first European occupation of the Mizque region seems to have been a continuation of the push southwards from Peru in the late 1530s and early 1540s that led to the founding of La Plata (now Sucre) and Potosí. A Villa de Mizque existed by 1557, and the area...
