Tambos and the Andean Longue Durée: Landscapes of Mobility in Far Southern Peru 
Noa Corcoran-Tadd

Long acknowledged as an important component of Inka imperial infrastructure, the Andean tambo or way station has had surprisingly little synthetic treatment in the archaeological and ethnohistorical literatures.  The post-conquest trajectory of the tambo as a colonial and later Republican institution is even less known, despite its role in tying together the fractured geography of the central Andes. In seeking to address this exclusion, I aim to offer an explicitly transconquest and multidisciplinary perspective on one of the Inka Empire’s most long-lived institutions. I present results from the recent Tambos de Palca Archaeological Project in the highlands of Tacna (far southern Peru), which surveyed one of the landscapes that would come to form the ruta de la plata (‘silver road’) between the great silver mines of Potosí and the Spanish Pacific.  Focusing on one of the key forms of infrastructural investment in the Andes – the tambos that were first established along the Inka imperial highways – the project explored the history of this institution in the region before and after the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century. Using a combination of techniques (remote sensing, GIS, pedestrian survey, targeted excavation, and archival research) to trace the historical continuities and transformations of the tambos along this high-altitude route, I explore these sites as a window into how the Inka infrastructural legacy and traditional indigenous mobilities articulated with the rise of new mercantile networks and the dynamics of global commodity booms. As such, the research aims to inform ongoing scholarly efforts to bridge persistent disciplinary gaps between historians, anthropologists and archaeologists interested in the early modern period in the Andes.

A People Apart: Factionalism and Conversion in Pueblo Mission Villages, A.D. 1620–1680
Adam Stack

Pecos Pueblo and Awat’ovi were two of the largest Ancestral Pueblo villages at the time when Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century. By A.D. 1620, major Franciscan missions had been established at both villages, entailing complex religious and political responses within the native communities. Archaeological excavations at both sites in the early twentieth century helped give rise to narratives about conversion and factionalism at Pecos and Awat’ovi that rely on Eurocentric templates and loosely applied ethnographic analogies. Geochemical sourcing of obsidian artifacts indicates that missionized Pueblo people engaged with other native groups and the landscape in ways that challenge these accepted narratives.