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Review Article

South American perspectives

Kevin Lane
Institut für Prähistorische Archäologie,
Freie Universität Berlin,
Altensteinstrasse 15,
14195 Berlin, Germany
(Email: kevin.lane@cantab.net)

The late Craig Morris provides the link between these two very different books: he contributed to the 2000 conference leading to La Arqueologia y la etnohistoria (hereafter AyE), and the Handbook of South American archaeology contains a dedication to his memory (the life and tragic death of Jim Petersen is also commemorated in that volume). Topic's handsome AyE volume posits that harnessing the dual interpretative strengths of archaeology and ethnohistory can make a significant contribution towards elucidating questions of the past, whilst the Handbook is a much more overarching project. It is to this volume that we turn first.

South American overview

Silverman and Isbell's volume sets an ambitious agenda: to cover the whole of South America's archaeology for the first time since The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, edited by Frank Solomon and Stuart Schwartz, came out in 1999. Indeed it could be said that nothing on this scale has been attempted since Julian H. Steward's seminal five-volume series, the Handbook of South American Indians back in the 1940s. As such it is a timely and welcome addition to the increasing corpus of material on South American archaeology.

If the geographical scope is ambitious, so is the chronological scale, from the peopling of the Americas to the Inca Empire. Yet rather than just engage in a narrative of all the major periods the editors have cleverly structured the Handbook around themes such as ‘Environment and Subsistence', ‘States and Empires' and ‘Death Practices and Beliefs'. This has the merit of coalescing articles around pan-South American themes as well as forcing the authors to engage more fully with the theoretical underpinnings of current archaeological practice in the Americas.

The Handbook is also novel in another manner: this is the first major volume espousing a continent-wide coverage to contain significant contributions from South American scholars. Without being in the least condescending, Silverman and Isbell make a real attempt to include scholars living and working in South America. With fifty-nine individual chapters by sixty-nine scholars, of which more than half are from South America itself, this is a unique book in this respect. Alongside known Amercanista luminaries such as Tom Dillehay, Deborah Pearsall, Clark Erickson and Christine Hastorf, we have important South American scholars such as Luis Alberto Borrero, Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Luis Jaime Castillo Butters and O. Hugo Benavides. Indeed the book reads as a roll-call of the great and the good, foreign and local, within the discipline.

The Handbook's engagement with cultural areas that have languished on the periphery of scholarly concern — due to the overbearing presence of the Central Andean zone in the mindset of South American investigative archaeology — is particularly welcome. These include a swathe of articles that cover Colombia, Venezuela, the Guianas, Ecuador and trans-Inca Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile. But the attempt to include the vast amount of fieldwork and literature from Brazil is, in my opinion, even more significant.

Brazil, the largest country in South America, has been almost absent from previous general archaeological treatises. This has as much to do with the isolation of the language in a largely Spanish-speaking continent as with the noted difficulties and opaqueness of much Amazonian study, of which Brazilian archaeology is a large part. This is changing and the Handbook is a first significant shot across the bows. The abiding impression is astonishment at the extent and depth of scholarly work in this area, from deep-time population expansions (Chapter 33 by Silva Noelli), to identity (Chapter 47 by Heckenberger), funerary practices (Chapter 50 by Guapindaia) and heritage management (Chapter 58 by Lopes Bastos & Funari).

Given the scope and scale of the volume it is hard to give each section its due credit but there is one in particular which I would highlight. This is the final section on the ethics and practice of South American archaeology (Chapters 53–58). Although traditionally lagging behind North America in acknowledging the convergence and conflict between indigenous rights, state nationalism and common patrimony, South America and its collective conscience have been awakened to the need to address these thorny issues. How we resolve what is becoming an increasingly heated debate — often fraught with compromise between foreign and local archaeologists, archaeologists and indigenous communities, state and private enterprise, preservation and exploitation — and how this debate impinges on archaeological practice and the way we approach monuments and landscapes will define how the discipline as a whole will progress into the twenty-first century, and not just in South America.

The original remit of the Handbook, echoing that of Steward's Handbook of South American Indians, was to provide a worthy guide for teaching and scholarly investigation. This has been achieved. Informative, at times provocative, but always sound and often prescient, this is a great volume and an exceptional introduction to the diverse nature of South American archaeology. Although the individual authors rightly deserve praise for their contributions, the greatest credit must go to the editors for what must have been a thoroughly taxing and often thankless task. The Handbook is a worthy testimony of their perseverance and insight.

Archaeology and ethnohistory

La arqueología y la etnohistoria, edited by John R. Topic, is a very different proposition. Thematically limited to the Andes and to archaeology and ethnohistory, it is perhaps surprising to note that it was the first major workshop integrating these two disciplines. The relevance of ethnohistoric accounts for interpreting Andean archaeology has significant pedigree including the studies by John V. Murra, Waldemar Espinoza and the doyenne of central Andean ethnohistory, María Rostworoski. Indeed Rostworowski features prominently in this volume and closes the book with a succinct and poised conclusion that calls for true multidisciplinarity, i.e. a fuller integration of ethnohistory, anthropology, archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, ethnobotany and perhaps even psychoanalysis. If so, this volume is a pretty good start.

Well organised into four sections the volume covers myths and cosmology; that recurrent hot topic — ethnicity and identity; the frontiers of the empire; and finally Rostworowski's piece considering archaeology and ethnohistory within its Andean setting. The contributors are an eclectic mix of ethnohistorians and archaeologists. South American scholars, as in the Handbook above, feature prominently. In fact, with the exception of John Topic's erudite introduction, all the articles are by South American scholars. The participation of US scholars is well handled through the use of an interesting editing device.

The contributions of Richard Burger, Gary Urton, Lucy Salazar and the late Craig Morris — all members of the Institute of Andean Research and co-sponsors of the conference and its proceedings — are confined to discursive interviews at the end of the articles. These interviews, conducted in and around the conference, greatly enhance the material presented, forcing the speakers to reflect and expand beyond the remit of their original papers. Again like the Handbook, AyE breaks new ground by focusing on areas generally peripheral to Central Andean ethnohistoric study, such as Ecuador, the northern Peruvian coast, eastern Bolivia, northern Chile and north-western Argentina. This is laudable, although probably not surprising, given the intended readership of a book written in Spanish and published in Peru.

After Topic's introduction the volume kicks off with Segundo Moreno Yánez's article on cosmology. His is a multidisciplinary approach to the concept of the sacred mountain with a twist. He advocates that the concept of the sacred mountain is common across the world and not just in the Andes or even particularly Andean in nature. Thus Moreno reflects on how the eighteenth-century gentleman traveller Alexander von Humboldt was inspired by the mountain. This brings into contention the oft-acknowledged idea that landscape is not a fixed text: it can be, but can be re-written, truly a landscape agency seen through ethnohistory.

Lorenzo Huertas Vallejos contributes an article on the theme of ethnicity and identity among the northern Peruvian Sechura. Four centuries of history from the start of the Spanish colony to the nineteenth century are charted through an analysis of documents, showing that the indigenous culture survived despite the social and economic disruptions brought about by European rule. Subsequent discussion reflects on how, notwithstanding these vestigial survivals, the wanton destruction of old micro-ethnicities and boundaries actually creates a new identity. From a fractured Prehispanic Sechura community, the colony unwittingly created a more homogenous Sechuran people concentrated around the colonial reduccion of San Martín de Sechura.

Shifting to northern Chile, archaeologists Calogero Santoro, Álvaro Romero, Vivien Standen and Daniela Valenzuela and ethnohistorian Jorge Hidalgo tackle the relationships and economic exclusivity of the Camanchaca fisherfolk, Cole agriculturalists and Caranga mitimaes (resettled highlanders). The prevailing view is that the reality on the ground is much more complex than the minimalistic division into these three categories would suggest, and that occupations and perception change through time and from valley to valley along the coast. It seems that exclusivity of economic production is a late development, coming into play with Inca colonisation of the area and subsequently emphasised under the Spanish colony. More generally, these articles stand as a warning to those who would also consider agriculture and herding as similar immutable and irreconcilable forms of production and therefore identity.

Imperial frontiers are considered in three articles, with Sonia Alconini writing on the eastern Bolivian Andes, and Verónica Williams and Ana María Lorandi writing on north-western Argentina. Starkly evident throughout is the varied nature of Inca imperial strategies. Rather than a fixed idea, frontiers are created ad hoc and change with altered circumstances. Alconini reflects on the frontier as a liminal zone of negotiation between Inca and local populations. Williams and Lorandi consider the nature of the empire and administration in Inca Argentina, teasing out patterns of provincial control in the former and the tributary rights of resettled mitima and imperial servant yana populations in the latter.

In its totality, the volume achieves its aim, shedding new light onto the wider possibilities and practice of archaeology and ethnohistory. The two disciplines emerge as less fundamentally different as sometimes perceived (that where historians and archaeologists see change, ethnohistorians see continuities, as noted by Segundo Moreno Yánez): an integrative approach can reconcile these differences of perspective.

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