Life beyond the City: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on Colonial Andean Mobility

Abstract

The great silver mining centers of Potosí, Porco, and Oruro in the Bolivian highlands have long formed an important focus for understanding the Spanish colonial world, both for the colonial imagination and for the contemporary historian. In comparison with the contexts of production and exchange based around these mining centers, however, their wider contexts of mobility and logistics within the altiplano and the valleys leading west to the Pacific coast have been comparatively under-investigated by historians and archaeologists alike. The following chapter considers these peripheral and ‘interstitial’ landscapes and the communities they constituted (particularly as they articulated with prehispanic legacies of mobility and infrastructure), while also synthesizing some of the recent research on the archaeology of the colonial south-central Andes. The resulting discussion highlights some of the ongoing tensions between a focus on urban and rural environments, between different scales of analysis, and between textual and archaeological sources of historical data.