Vintage Moquegua: History, Wine, and Archaeology on a Colonial Peruvian Periphery [1 ed.] 9780292735477, 9780292728622

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v i n ta g e m o q u egua

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joe r. and teresa lozano long series in latin americ an and latino art and culture

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prudence m. ri c e

Vintage Moquegua

@$2@$2@$2 h i s t o r y , w i n e , a n d a r c h a e o l o gy on a colonial peruvian periphery

@$2@$2@$2 university of texas press, austin

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Copyright © 2011 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2012 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713–7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rice, Prudence M. Vintage Moquegua : history, wine, and archaeology on a colonial Peruvian periphery / by Prudence M. Rice. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-292-72862-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-292-73547-7 (e-book) 1. Moquegua River Valley (Peru)—History. 2. Wine and wine making—Peru—Moquegua River Valley— History. 3. Viticulture—Peru—Moquegua River Valley—History. 4. Excavations (Archaeology)— Peru—Moquegua River Valley. 5. Moquegua River Valley (Peru)—Antiquities. I. Title. f3451.m8r53 2012 985'.34— dc22 2011015285

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The landscape is constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves. tim ingold “The Temporality of the Landscape,” 1993

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c o nt e nt s

List of Illustrations, ix Preface, xiii Acknowledgments, xvii

1. Introduction: Contexts and Contextualizing, 1 pa r t i

Background and Deep Context, 21 2. Theory: Peripheries, Frontiers, Actors, and Innovations, 23 3. Core-State: Spain, Wine, and the Birth of Empire, 46 4. Periphery: Moquegua, Its Physical Environment, and Indigenous Peoples, 60 pa r t i i

Actors and Institutions: Moquegua on the Periphery of Empire, 75 5. Following the Actors, Act 1: Discovery and Exploration, 77 6. Following the Actors, Act 2: Encomiendas, Encomenderos, and Founders, 94 7. Colonial Institutions: Peripheral Transformations and Contested Identities, 114 par t i i i

Wine: The Commodity, 133 8. Commerce: Wine in an Imperial Colonial Economy, 135 9. Production: Growing Grapes and Making Wine in Moquegua, 154 10. Liquid Assets: A Historical Overview of Moquegua’s Wine Economy, 173

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par t i v

Material Culture: Objects as Actors and Agents, 189 11. Rural Landscape and Built Environment, 191 12. Ceramics: Industrial and Domestic, 215 13. The Structures of Everyday Life: Nonceramic Artifacts and Materials, 238 pa r t v

Concluding Synthesis: On the Frontier of a Periphery of an Empire, 259 14. Dichotomies versus Mosaics, 261 Notes, 285 | References, 293 | Index, 333

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i l l u s t rat i ons

figures 1.1. Southwestern Peru, 2 1.2. The Moquegua valley, 5 1.3. The Moquegua valley, view to the southwest, 6 1.4. The modern city of Moquegua, 7 1.5. View of Taquila bodega, 8 2.1. Patterns of adoption of an innovation, 43 3.1. The Iberian Peninsula, 47 4.1. Southern Peru and adjacent countries, 61 4.2. Tributary system of the Río Osmore, 65 4.3. The confluence of the tributaries of the Río Osmore, 68 4.4. The Aymara-speaking region of southwestern Peru, 71 6.1. Indigenous communities and roads in southern Peru, 96 6.2. The family tree of Hernán Bueno, 102 6.3. The family tree of Juan de la Torre, 110 8.1. Guaman Poma’s illustration of a kuraka dressed in Spanish clothing, 148 9.1. Guaman Poma’s illustration of a Spaniard threatening two Andean trajinantes loading a llama, 161 11.1. Old house in Moquegua, 193 11.2. Chincha bodega, 193 11.3. Toponymic zones in the Middle and Lower Moquegua valley, 194 11.4. Stone mosaic patio at Chincha bodega, 199

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11.5. Bodega site-plan types, 202 11.6. Chapel at Yahuay bodega, 204 11.7. The “arch room” at Yahuay bodega, 204 11.8. Schematic drawing of the gravity model for wine-making, 204 11.9. The lagar enclosure at Montalvo bodega, 206 11.10. Tinajas at Cruz Verde bodega, 207 11.11. Distillery facility at Calaluna bodega, 208 11.12. Ruins of a Colonial-period bridge across the Río Tumilaca, 211 12.1. Location of the twenty-eight shovel-tested bodega sites, 217 12.2. Spanish tinajas, 218 12.3. The 1590 tinaja at Yaravico Viejo, 222 12.4. Inscriptions on Moquegua tinajas, 223 12.5. (a–e) Botija profiles; (f ) Mechero Plain profile, 224 12.6. Profiles of “setters,” 228 12.7. A botija held upright by a “setter,” 229 12.8. Cuy Plain pottery, 230 12.9. Más Allá Polychrome pottery, 233 12.10. Escapalaque Yellow Polychrome pottery, 233 13.1. Metal artifacts from Chincha bodega, 242 13.2. Cluster analysis solution for shovel-tested bodegas, 254 14.1. Colonial actors and environments of accumulation and change, 265 tables 1.1. Premodern Spanish history and European economic formations, 13 2.1. Nested levels of center–periphery systems in the Spanish colonial world and southern Peru, 27 2.2. Dichotomous characterizations of frontiers, 32 3.1. Chronology of premodern and early modern Spain, 49 4.1. Recent population data for the Department of Moquegua, 62 4.2. Characteristics of four sections of the Río Osmore, 66 4.3. Late pre-Hispanic and Colonial-period chronology of Southern Peru and Moquegua, 69

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tables

5.1. Division of the gold and silver ransomed for the Inka Atahualpa, 83 5.2. Early Peruvian governors (of New Castile), viceroys, and presidents (of the Audiencia of Lima), 84 5.3. Population of the Province of Moquegua and the city of Moquegua in 1792, 92 6.1. Provincias and caciques in the tributaries of the Ríos Tambo and Osmore in 1540 and 1542, 99 8.1. Exports of viticultural products to Spain’s New World colonies, 1650–1699, 141 8.2. Spanish units of liquid measure, 147 8.3. Spanish decrees affecting early New World viticulture and trade, 150 9.1. Population of southern Peruvian wine districts in 1795, 169 11.1. Toponymic zones of the Moquegua valley, and numbers of bodega sites, 195 11.2. Distribution of Moquegua bodega site layouts by valley area, 200 11.3. Occurrence of kilns by valley location and site plan, 212 12.1. Shovel-tested bodegas, 216 12.2. Size of Moquegua tinajas, 219 13.1. Quantitative summary of plant remains from the four excavated bodega sites, 246 13.2. Quantitative summary of archaeofauna from the four excavated bodega sites, by time period, 251

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p r e fa c e

The Moquegua Bodegas Project was perhaps the first anthropologically based multi- and interdisciplinary historical and industrial archaeology project in the Andes—or at least the first to systematically investigate the establishment of rural colonial settlements and agro-industry—and so it is appropriate to briefly discuss its genesis. In the early 1980s, Michael Moseley, a new colleague at the University of Florida, was initiating a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary project in the Department of Moquegua in far southern Peru and invited me to participate. At that point, my Maya work in Guatemala was becoming increasingly tenuous because of that country’s civil war, and a move to the Andes sounded interesting. Besides, as Mike told me, knowing of my interest in pottery, “there are lots of big jars.” So I briefly visited him in the field in 1983. After driving up and down the Moquegua valley for a day or two I hazarded an optimistic opinion that in a summer field season of three to four weeks a graduate student and I should be able to record basic observations on the forty-some winery hacienda sites (bodegas) that I estimated to be in the valley. Little did I realize that I would eventually be dealing with 130 of these sites, and they would occupy my thoughts for much of the next quarter-century. During the time I spent in Moquegua in the following years, traipsing through abandoned adobe ruins and talking to citizens, I devoted considerable effort to promoting cultural conservation. I proclaimed the significance of these structures to Moquegua’s history to anyone who would suffer my Spanglish; I championed the goal of preserving them and protecting them from further damage. Most of the time the citizens seemed to agree . . . although they were somewhat bemused that it was a norteamericana who was so concerned about their corner of the world. But while outwardly voicing sympathy with preservation they were simultaneously—almost gleefully—destroying sites. I remember visiting one bodega site and chatting with the owner, an articulate middle-aged woman, who concurred emphatically with my points about preservation . . . and then cheerily informed me that she was dismantling the xiii

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stone-lined grape-crushing tank on her property to build a garage. At another site, our shovel-testing took place even while adobes from the colonial structure were being cannibalized for reuse in a new building under construction. As I wrote grant proposals to support this field project, and then began writing up the findings, I was—and still am—mystified by the dearth of reference to wine and brandy in books about colonial Peru and its political economy (cf. Brown 1986; Cushner 1980; Davies 1984). In book after book I consulted, wine and viticulture were not even entries in the index, although interesting data could occasionally be found in footnotes. Consequently, I saw a need to synthesize the background to the Peruvian wine industry, discussing the role of wine in pre-imperial Spain as well as its Roman roots, and especially its technology. I set about writing up the archaeological data from the project in the early 1990s . . . and then became distracted by fieldwork in Guatemala through the next fifteen years or so . . . and thus only in 2009, with the benefit of a yearlong 50 percent administrative research leave generously granted by siuc, was I able to get back to these data. And I discovered that there has been a virtual explosion of exciting and creative theoretical approaches to the archaeology of capitalism, a growing body of work by wine historians in the Southern Cone, and a burgeoning field of historical archaeology throughout South America. Also since the 1980s, a considerable literature corpus has developed on colonialism and postcolonialism. The present narrative is very much a “reconstructed logic” of the fieldwork that begat it. But the study of viticulture and wine- and brandy-making in sixteenth-century and later Moquegua lends itself to a great variety of theoretical approaches, many of which appeared in the last two decades. I have selected some of them—archaeology of capitalism, actor-network theory, worldsystem theory, frontier theory—to frame my interpretive narrative. Others could have been chosen. This volume draws inspiration from Amy Trubek’s The Taste of Place (2008)—“goût de terroir”—as “the flavor or odor of certain locales that are given to its products, particularly with wine.” The odor of bodega sites in the 1980s was decidedly unpleasant, a consequence of the goats penned (and excreting) in the structures, and so for years following the project I couldn’t bring myself to eat goat cheese. Peruvian wine is not highly esteemed in today’s international markets—I always thought it ironic that Peruvian national airlines served Chilean wine on their international flights in the late 1980s—and evidence suggests this pejorative view may be of long standing. But it seems

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to be changing: typing “Peru wine” into the Google search engine recently resulted in about 1,300,000 hits, including information on wine tours and guides to Peruvian wines, and the bodegas producing the best wines, located in Ica in south-central coastal Peru, today have their own websites. Spellings of Quechua and Aymara words, especially toponyms, in all but the most recent literature are highly variable and unstandardized, the inconsistency compounded by notoriously idiosyncratic colonial Spanish orthography. The most obvious issue is that of vowels u and o: Quechua and Aymara employ the vowel u, while the presence of o indicates a hispanicization. Similar difficulties plague the use of consonants t and d. For example, Condesuyos is a hispanicization of Quechua Cuntisuyu. I introduce spellings as found in the original sources, and then generally adopt the more common later Spanish versions (e.g., Cochuna, as opposed to Cuchuna). Finally, I must add two notes. One concerns my references to “Peru.” In the early Colonial period the Virreinato del Perú (Viceroyalty of Peru) encompassed virtually all of the continent of South America except the eastern projection of what is now Brazil. In discussing the Spanish conquest, colonization, and establishment of administrative jurisdictions, viticulture, and so on in the region, considerations of manuscript length and my own scholarly limitations preclude analysis of this vast territory. Thus, except where I specifically reference the Viceroyalty of Peru, my use of “Peru” pertains to the territory of the modern nation-state. Second, I wish to clarify that nothing in Vintage Moquegua (particularly my statements in chapter 14) should be construed as tacit approval of the Spanish conquest of the New World and the accompanying decimation of its indigenous populations and cultures. Nor, for that matter, am I glorifying capitalism. Rather, given that the Spanish conquest did occur and capitalism was introduced, my assertions are simply assessments about the ways and degrees to which the Spaniards achieved their political and economic ends, to the extent that these are (partially) explicable through the models, theories, and data presented herein.

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a c k no w l e d g ments

One of the benefits of returning to this book project after some fifteen years is that it has reminded me of the great affection I feel for Moquegua as place, and for the many individuals who assisted me at various stages of research. First I thank Mike Moseley for inviting me to Peru in the first place. I greatly appreciate his assistance and encouragement, and his visits in the field were always instructive. The activities of the Moquegua Bodegas Project were carried out within Programa Contisuyo, a joint archaeological program sponsored in Peru through the auspices of the Museo Peruano de Ciencias de la Salud, Dr. Fernando Cabieses, Director. Permits for excavation were authorized by the Comisión Nacional de Arqueología and the Instituto Nacional de Cultura in Lima, under Resoluciones Supremas nos. 176-86ed, 322-88ed, 236-88ed, and 34-89ed. I am grateful to these institutions for granting the necessary permissions for this project. During the six-year course of the Moquegua Bodegas Project, a number of entities in the United States provided funds for research. The 1985 and 1986 surveys were supported by the Division of Sponsored Research and the Latin American Studies Center at the University of Florida, the Wentworth Foundation of Clearwater, Florida, and the National Geographic Society (research grant no. 3256-086). Excavations and mapping of the wine hacienda sites during the 1987 through 1989 field seasons, as well as analysis during the 1990 field season, were funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant no. ro-21477-87) as part of its Columbian Quincentenary initiative, and by the National Geographic Society (research grant nos. 3566-87 and 4065-89). I am indebted to all these institutions for their support. In addition, graduate students working with the project were funded by the University of Florida (Latin American Studies Center and Department of Anthropology), the University of Chicago, Sigma Xi, and the National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant program (bns-9020973 to Elizabeth Wing and Susan deFrance). xvii

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acknowledgments

Several companies and agencies in Moquegua provided valuable cooperation and logistical support for members of the project over the years, and I want to express my personal gratitude. The Southern Peru Copper Corporation (spcc) provided project personnel with housing, meals, transportation, vehicles, maintenance, introductions, and continuing interest in our work, without all of which our studies would have been significantly less successful. In addition, the Corporación Departamental del Desarrollo de Moquegua (cordem), Concejo Provincial, Departamento de Educación, Escuela Técnica, Ministerio de Agricultura, cipa ix, and 3a División Blindada del Ejército Peruano contributed vital assistance at various times during our surveys and excavations. Institutional support is crucial, but at the same time it is individuals who make the difference in the success of a project. Work in Moquegua was aided substantially by many wonderful people who unfailingly provided friendship and problem-solving capabilities whenever the going got rough. Chief among them were Antonio Biondi, who introduced us to the pisco brandy industry from the vineyard to the factory to the bottle and graciously granted us permission to excavate at Chincha bodega on his land; and Germán Morón of spcc, who drove us around to visit sites and for six years patiently provided logistical support no matter how importunate the request or inane the question. I am exceptionally grateful to these gentlemen. Other kind and helpful individuals in Lima and Moquegua include Walter Preble and the late Victor Barua of spcc; Carlos López of Enturperu; Julio Biondi, who rented us project housing in Moquegua; and Alberto Villegas, who gave us several tours of his active bodega and generous samples of its products. Harm de Blij’s enthusiasm for things southern and vinous was a source of encouragement and inspiration, and I cannot thank him enough. A very special debt is owed to Luis K. (Lucho) Watanabe, Peruvian codirector of Programa Contisuyo, who coped heroically, often twenty-four hours a day, with the continuous demands of local public relations, changing national permitting regulations, and gringo frustrations. Gloria Salinas Portugal maintained the project house in Moquegua and regularly ran interference for us, and I greatly enjoyed her friendship. Marcelo Arroyo joined us in the field during the 1987 season, and we all valued his contributions and insights. Lorenzo Huertas and Leonor López did yeoman service in the archives; without their transcriptions this history of Moquegua could never have been written and I am most appreciative of their efforts. John Jones’s analysis of our botanical remains in 1989 was welcomed by all. Hugo Ludeña visited us all too briefly in the field and provided counsel on colonial history. Ann Cordell con-

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tributed preliminary petrographic analysis of tinaja and botija fragments. And finally, the owners and residents of Moquegua’s bodega sites deserve heartfelt thanks for politely (albeit skeptically) enduring the disruptions brought by our work as we tramped through their fields, probed into their homes, and counted and measured the buildings and tinajas in their yards. I do not, however, thank their accursed, vicious dogs . . . although trying to knock them off the side of the road was jolly good fun. Without the labor of a dedicated group of hardworking graduate students between 1985 and 1990, this project would not have existed. I warmly thank Donna Ruhl, who assisted me in the initial surveys in 1985 and 1986, and Greg Charles Smith, who supervised field and laboratory operations in Moquegua from 1987 to 1990; others (in alphabetical order) include Peter Bürgi, Chris Clement, Susan deFrance, Sara Van Beck, and Mary Van Buren. Students, friends, and colleagues, but above all my pollitos, the “Badilejos Flamantes” got the work done, taught their Mama Gallina a good deal, and provided me with endless good times. I am grateful beyond words. At the University of Florida and siuc I had the pleasure of working with Ignacio Avellaneda and Gilberto F. Pineda, respectively, who volunteered their translation services for the archival documents López and Huertas transcribed for me. I have depended heavily on the Interlibrary Loan Services of Morris Library and their promptness regularly delights me. As always, I am grateful to Don for his skills with computer illustration, and to the six greatest feline fuzz-therapists east of the Mississippi.

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introduction

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introduction Contexts and Contextualizing

One could discuss whether to call a wine a product, a value, a habit, or a need, but by all the evidence of history it takes time to develop a distinguished wine and a palate for it. —james lockhart, “Trunk Lines and Feeder Lines: The Spanish Reaction to American Resources,” 1991

Vintage Moquegua is a story of Spanish colonialism, emerging capitalism, commodity consumption, and class and identity formation in an agroindustrial periphery of the world-economy. The setting is the tiny Moquegua valley in the desert western mountains of far southern Peru (fig. 1.1), a nearly forgotten corner of Spain’s once-wealthy New World empire. The time is the Colonial period, 1533 to 1823. The plot concerns the arrival of avaricious strangers into, and their usurpation of, this new land to make it productive in the image of their European homeland and to satisfy their desires for personal wealth. The methods of both history and archaeology—historical archaeology— are used here to tell the story of Moquegua’s colonial frontier experience, which was above all a story about wine. For more than three centuries, the residents of rural Spanish-colonial Moquegua produced the wines and grape brandy consumed in towns sprinkled through the interior high plateau of the southern Andes. Chief among them were Potosí and the wealthy silvermining district of Alto Peru, modern Bolivia. l a n ds c a pe , s pace , a nd p l a c e Although the narrative thread here is temporal (i.e., economic history) and the primary actors are human, space and place play active roles. Spaces of interest include “natural” landscapes defined geophysically (oceans, mountains, river valleys) as well as cultural landscapes created by human activity and identified by theoretical concepts: centers and peripheries, frontiers and 1

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1.1. Southwestern Peru, showing the location of major cities and river systems. The bordered rectangle is the “Moquegua valley” section of the Río Osmore drainage (see fig. 1.2). Contours in meters.

boundaries. Rather than being neutral/empty, static/passive backgrounds or stages on which human relations and actions are played out through time, these spaces are instead actively constitutive of these relations (Gupta and Ferguson 1997a; Keith and Pile 1993a; Massey 1993; Rodman 1992). No longer is the mantra simply that “space is socially constructed”; instead it is “the social is spatially constructed,” a position that grants spatiality an active role in the production of history and in politics (Massey 1993:146; also Lefebvre 1991). Of greater interest are places: spaces invested with social meanings by the people who interact with them. Anthropologists’ culturally defined place is approximated by “radical geographers” ’ space: “an active, constitutive, irreducible, necessary component” in the creation of the social (Keith and Pile 1993c:36). Whether frontiers or colonies or towns or nation-states, places are

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socially identified, created, and contested; they are loci where identities are negotiated and renegotiated and where shifting relations of power are continuously played out. Places are politically fraught because they are “the (covert) medium and (disguised) expression of asymmetrical relations of power” (ibid.: 38). Moquegua is the place of interest here. As a colonial frontier, its story of “place-becoming” and internal identity negotiation and power relations is told from diachronic, pericentric, and local-regional perspectives. Moquegua is situated in the rigorous environment of southwestern Peru, which encompasses some of the most dramatic climatic and topographic extremes imaginable: fog-shrouded coastal desert, craggy mountainous sierra, and frigid treeless plateau (altiplano). The altitudinal and climatic extremes of this region were punctuated by frequent but unpredictable natural disasters, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, and warm El Niño–driven rains. The Peruvian environment differed most dramatically from that of conquering Spain by virtue of its extreme physiographic and biotopic contrasts, the narrow compression of altitudinal-environmental zones, and active tectonism. In terms of soils and climate, however, the differences between the two regions, while undeniably real, are less striking (Fernández Dávila 1947:163). Core components of the medieval agro-pastoral economy of the Iberian Peninsula, particularly those of the dry Mediterranean regions of southern Spain—sheep, goats, wheat, grapes, olives, stone fruits, citrus—were easily transferred to Peru. Despite the mountainous terrain and desert, which constituted formidable physical obstacles to agricultural expansion, Old World crops thrived under irrigation in the coastal river valleys. In southern Peru these introduced plants and livestock formed the basis of the agricultural sector of the colonial economy. theoretical context i: colonial encounters Among the pivotal issues in comparative studies of complex societies are the interrelated and complex processes of cultural contacts, interactions, colonial encounters, colonialism, and imperialism. Anthropological and archaeological scholarship on the subject has greatly expanded since the mid-1990s (e.g., Cusick 1998; Dietler 2005, 2007; Ewen 2000; Gosden 2004; Lyons and Papadopoulos 2002; Pels 1997; Prakash 1995; Schortman and Urban 1998; Silliman 2005; Stein 1998, 2005a). A frequent aim is to create the broadest-possible theory or concepts for describing and understanding cultural encounters and 3

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expansionist interactions, ancient and modern—a “covering model” of sorts. Unsurprisingly, with this ambitious goal, theoretical configurations are often deemed unsatisfactory and little agreement exists, for example, on whether we are studying colonies, colonization, or colonialism (Stein 2005b:4–5). Indeed, the methods to achieve this goal seem predestined to fail: studies of diverse colonies from throughout world history are amassed . . . then dismay ensues when no concurrence on theory has been achieved and no universal narrative created. For anthropologists, a large part of the problem stems from frustration in trying to apply concepts and definitions developed by twentieth-century historians. For example, the strict definition of “colony” by Moses I. Finley (1976) is rejected as “over-restrictive” (Stein 2005b:10). World-system theory is similarly dismissed: it provides “mechanistically reductionist, structurally overdetermined, functionalist explanations,” and even center–periphery distinctions pose some “alarming dangers” in reifying hegemony (Dietler 2005:58, 59). But it strikes me as unreasonable to assume, in this postcolonial world, that any of these concepts/models/approaches should be applicable in all times and places. Is it realistic to expect that colonies established through early modern European expansion and the rise of capitalism will be directly comparable to those of ancient Greece or Rome? The so-called traditional model of European colonial expansion—emigration from the homeland, subjugation of local inhabitants, exploitation of their labor, and imposition of a controlled political economy—was certainly not a universalist script of rules and practices rigidly pursued by every European country, or even in every colony established by a single country, such as Spain, at all times. But in some situations, such as Spain’s sixteenth-century invasion and colonization of Andean South America, a general world-system model such as that of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 2004) can provide a useful departure point. Similarly, the early mercantilist-capitalist relations between Spain and its Andean colonies (specifically Moquegua) can be appropriately accommodated in the world-system model. Rather than rejecting such broad historical models, archaeologists might endeavor to recast them to align with contemporary anthropological viewpoints (e.g., Stein 2005b:8–9). Working within an overarching world-system metanarrative does not, of necessity, obviate any specifics of a new interactional paradigm demanding attention to internal dynamics, agency, multivocality, power relations, and diachronic and local perspectives. I incorporate

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these perspectives in broadening the capitalist world-system model anthropologically and historico-archaeologically. archaeological context The Moquegua valley is the middle portion of the path of the Río Osmore in far southern Peru (fig. 1.2). Viewed from the air, the valley is a ribbon-like oasis, a narrow green stripe of tidy farm plots and sparse trees streaking southwestward through the barren Andean desert. The Osmore’s three tributaries emerge high in the Pacific sierra and tumble precipitously down the mountainsides. After they join, the river flows gently southward for 20 km, hugging the base of the hills (fig. 1.3) before abruptly disappearing to run underground for half of the remaining distance to the ocean. On the south side of the broad, arrow-shaped confluence sits the swelling city of Moquegua (fig. 1.4), a checkerboard of streets and houses and plazas linked by dusty roadways

1.2. The Moquegua valley, showing the confluence of the three tributaries and the location of the city of Moquegua and the nearby small town of Samegua as they were in the 1980s. Bodega sites and related facilities are distributed throughout the valley.

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1.3. The Upper–Middle Moquegua valley (view to the southwest), showing the narrowing of the valley as it heads south among the barren hills. 1.4. (facing page) View southeast across the broad, cultivated upper valley to the modern city of Moquegua, set against the bordering mountains.

to distant communities nestled in other valley oases high in the mountains. Outside the city’s new suburbs, the landscape is decidedly rural, with adobe structures both occupied and abandoned dotting the edges of the tiny fields (fig. 1.5). The Moquegua Bodegas Project Fieldwork and data collection were carried out during six summer field seasons between 1985 and 1990 as the Moquegua Bodegas Project, which focused on the valley’s winery sites. The project was an archaeological and historical investigation of economic and technological factors influencing the establishment and functioning of colonial Moquegua’s wine and brandy agroindustry. Goals can be phrased in several ways. One set of goals lay in the realm of historical geography: What were the locations and dates of the first Spanish settlements in the Moquegua valley, and what was the history of landholdings? The project involved inventorying

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1.5. Taquila bodega, on the edge of flatland on the west side of the narrow, far southern valley. View to the west.

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the rural valley’s colonial cultural heritage just as it was disappearing rapidly in the face of modernization—describing the architectural and artifactual assemblages that characterized the wine agro-industry’s technology before they were destroyed by construction of new buildings, roads, and irrigation canals. On an analytic level, the Bodegas Project fit squarely within James Deetz’s (1977:5) definition of historical archaeology as “the archaeology of the spread of European culture throughout the world since the fifteenth century and its impact on indigenous peoples.” Thus the Bodegas Project was concerned with processes of change in one kind of “macro”-space: a periphery of colonialism, the southwestern Peruvian Andes, and the accommodation, adaptation, and transformation of European and indigenous cultural patterns in the region during the Colonial period. I was interested in how Spanish cultural practice associated with wine was imposed and reproduced, the degree to which it may or may not have involved integration with indigenous cultural modes, and, ultimately, how it was transformed into a distinctly Peruvian enterprise. I was also interested in a particular kind of “micro”-space in southwestern Peru: its bodegas. The Spanish word bodega has several referents: “wine cellar, storeroom, warehouse” (New World Spanish/English English/Spanish Dictionary) and also “wine shop, an establishment where wine is made and/or blended and matured, and a firm engaged in making, maturing, and/or shipping wine” (Read 1986:229). The etymology may be traced to a Greek word for a pottery vessel (boutis) that holds wine or to Latin apotheca: a storehouse for wine, wine cellar, warehouse, wineshop, bar (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary). At the same time, I was interested in the material expression of identities, drawing inspiration from Peggy K. Liss’s (1975) study of early Mexican colonial history and “the origins of nationality.” Identity construction and negotiation are ongoing processes in frontier settings. The fluid social, economic, and political circumstances of frontier/periphery existence foreground identity construction as a recursive process, but identity negotiation is contingent on context (Keith and Pile 1993c:28), and that context is ever-changing in a frontier or periphery. On a collective level, identity construction is typically a matter of identifying and categorizing differences between “us” and “them,” such as indigenous peoples versus newcomers or, among the latter, between first-comers and later arrivals. Identities, everywhere and always, are “produced through the negotiation of power relations” and are “situationally mutable” (Orser 2010:125, 126).

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Elusive and essentialist abstractions such as national identity are, to be sure, difficult to investigate historically and nearly impossible archaeologically. In the Peruvian case especially, long-standing conflicts between competing ethnic and class constituencies have prompted philosophical debates as to whether a “Peruvian nation” even exists as an entity (e.g., Iwasaki Cauti 1988). Nonetheless, “nations, and national cultures are artifacts—continually imagined, invented, contested, and transformed by the agencies of individual persons, the state, and global flows of commodities” (Foster 1991:252). As recent studies link national identity to primary production (Lacoste 2005), to capitalism-fueled consumption of imported goods and modernity (Orlove and Bauer 1997a), and to food (Trubek 2008) and wine (Ulin 1995), such a perspective admits the archaeological exercise of focusing specifically on commodities—and on a single commodity such as wine—to trace its role in this larger process. A related source of inspiration for the Bodegas Project was Sidney W. Mintz’s investigation of “the anthropology of sugar.” After about 1650, sugar “began to change from a luxury and a rarity into a commonplace and a necessity,” he writes (Mintz 1985: xxix), adding that he wanted to explore the “special significance” of sugar in the growth of capitalism. Like Mintz, whose research in the Caribbean made him want to “know more about sugar and rum and coffee and chocolate” (ibid.: xv), working in Moquegua made me want to know more about wine. Not in the sense of connoisseurship, but rather its history, ecology, and economy as an instrument of and for the colonial and emerging capitalist enterprise. My goal, although I did not realize it at the time, was to investigate terroir: what Amy Trubek (2008) has called “a taste of place.” Wine may not have played as essential a role as sugar in the growth of world capitalism, but it was a significant commodity—a luxury and also a necessity—in much of the early modern Western world. Until the very late twentieth century, the role of wine in Spanish—and also Roman—imperial colonies was underanalyzed and undertheorized by historians, especially English-speakers. Several reasons for this neglect have been suggested: “the relative unimportance of viticulture in English-speaking areas, the barrier of language, and . . . a certain primness . . . [that] would associate wine with luxury, frivolity and immorality . . . and consequently consider it unworthy of serious study” (Dickenson and Salt 1982:159; also Gusfield 1987:77–78). Related to this puritanism are millennia of morally motivated laws restricting the planting of vineyards in favor of the sustenance of cereals. Wine is polysemic, defined contextually as sacred symbol (blood of Christ) and earthly aphrodisiac, basic foodstuff and luxury import. The many lyrical,

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humanistic quasi-histories constructed about wine in the classical world render it difficult to tease apart wine fact and wine fiction. For a serious evaluation of its role in economic history, wine needs to be demythologized and analyzed more broadly—and anthropologically—as the secular commodity it was. From at least Roman times, wine had an important and versatile role in an imperial homeland, in interactions with its colonies, and in intercolony relations. Space- and place-based differences in the role of wine and viticulture contribute significant insights into politico-economic interchanges between cores and their peripheries. Transformations in the socioeconomic role of wine were similar to, as well as different from, those of sugar. In the case of colonial Moquegua, they constitute the warp and weft of the colorful tapestry of the valley’s history. Latin American Historical Archaeology Another salient aspect of space, place, and context concerns the (sub)discipline of Spanish-colonial historical archaeology and the intellectual traditions within which it is pursued. Spanish-colonial historical archaeology has a strong grounding in North American scholarship, with researchers focusing on La Florida (e.g., Deagan 1983, 1985) and “Borderlands” areas (Naum 2010; Thomas 1991; Williams and Fournier-Garcia 1996:67–69) such as the Southwestern U.S. and California, since the early twentieth century (Orser 2001). Its history as a discipline in Latin America, particularly in South America, is considerably attenuated, however, and has a different trajectory of development. Several reviews of the literature and assessments of the field have appeared in English-language publications, rendering another such exercise redundant. Instead I simply highlight points relevant to the study of colonial Moquegua and its wine agro-industry. Historical or colonial archaeology in Latin America began almost by happenstance, through restoration of colonial churches, monasteries, and palatial residences of wealthy elites. These activities were initiated as part of efforts glorifying national identity; they were typically carried out in the absence of theory, they were rarely systematically reported, and the study of material culture—the domain of archaeologists—was mostly undertaken by “others”: art historians, architects, and collectors. The nature of disciplinary relations between archaeology and history was debated, the conflicts exacerbated by a lack of common vocabulary and goals (Funari 1997). In addition, the combination of Marxist-leaning social archaeology, military rule, and dictatorship in many parts of South America stifled free inquiry in archaeology in general (Funari 1997:193–194, 197; Jamieson 2005:354–355). These were fundamental 11

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disagreements about who owns the past and who creates its “grand historical narratives” (Gilchrist 2005): indigenous ethnic groups? Euro-American elites? historians? archaeologists? politico-military leaders? Ross W. Jamieson’s (2005) review of historical archaeology in the Andes noted an enduring concept for researchers in the pre-Spanish periods of this area: lo Andino, the constellation of cultural traits that define the region’s uniqueness but which also contribute to a static, essentialist view of its history. It is only around the mid-1980s that Ibero-American archaeology broadened to incorporate rural sites, industrial and plantation landscapes, and early Colonialperiod mission sites and reducción communities (see, e.g., Funari 1997; Jamieson 2000; Wernke 2007a, 2007b). Despite these developments, there is still no “unity of theoretical approaches” and archaeologists “have not created any sort of uniquely Andean brand of historical archeology. Part of this may be due to the heavy investment in idealizing the pre-Columbian past [lo Andino] as a model for national identity” (Jamieson 2005:353). Another part may stem from the multiple nationalities and academic traditions brought to these endeavors. theoretical context 2 : the archaeology of capitalism Because this study is about wine, an important commodity in the Spanishcolonial world, it is also inevitably about—and an archaeology of—capitalism. Capitalism has been around for a while, but it is relatively new as a label for an archaeological approach (Leone 1995; Orser 2010:120–125). The definition and origins of capitalism are much contested by historians, economists, and other social theorists. Neither my background nor my present goals give me license to contribute authoritatively to these debates, but they do require me to provide an overview. A Microhistory of Capitalism Capitalism, or the capitalist mode of production, is based in the relations of means of production (land, tools, resources), such that some people (capitalists) hold more wealth in the form of these resources, which they use to buy other people’s labor (Wolf 1982:77). Laborers produce surpluses over and above their “wage packages,” and it is the drive to increase these surpluses and reinvest them in the enterprise that is at the heart of capitalism. Capitalist production, then, is a process of “continuously expanding surpluses by inten-

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sifying productivity through an ever-rising curve of technological inputs,” thereby transforming the means of production (ibid.: 78). Capitalism presupposes the existence of money-based economies and production of goods for exchange (surplus production) rather than for household use or “own use.” In its simplest sense capitalism is based on the distribution of these goods at an elevated price to realize a profit (Hooker 1996). Profitmaking was an element of the ancient Roman imperial market economy as well as that of later Muslim cultures, both of which strongly influenced pre-expansionist Iberia. Early medieval (ninth through twelfth centuries) capitalism is often referred to as merchant capitalism or early mercantilism (table 1.1) because it is characterized by significant innovations in commercial practices, including the formation of trading companies and partnerships and concepts of contracts, credit, and capital. Eric Wolf (1982:79), however, argues that merchant capitalism is not “real” (sensu Marx) capitalism because there is no reinvestment of wealth/surpluses in intensified production and enhanced means of production. Early mercantilism in Europe is often associated with a social formation called feudalism, another concept that is difficult to define and contested by Table 1.1. Premodern Spanish History and European Economic Formations Period or Era

Dates

Economic Formation

late antiquity Spanish Roman period

133 B.C.–A.D. 414

Imperial colony

Gothic period

414–711

Feudalism?

middle ages (muslim period and christian reconquest, –) Transitional

8th c.

Feudalism

Early Medieval period (early mercantilism)

9th–12th cent.

Merchant capitalism

Late Medieval period

13th cent.–1492

“True” mercantilism

early modern period Spanish imperialism

1492–1808

“True” mercantilism

modern period “Industrial Revolution”

1808–

Capitalism

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historians. Two general meanings are common (Halsall 1998): (1) a society in which “peasant agriculture is the fundamental productive activity and in which a small elite defined by military activity dominates” (sometimes called manorialism); (2) “a system of reciprocal personal relations among members of the military elite.” Feudalism is characterized by a lack of centralized politico-economic administration and provision of services; instead, wealthy landholders granted parcels of land (fiefs) to tenants (vassals) in exchange for their labor in agricultural production and military service. The duty of the local lords or knights was to protect their vassals and their property during the frequent raids and conflicts that erupted in the countryside. Later medieval relations and practices began to typify what might be called true mercantilism, which laid the foundation for the development of industrial (Marxist) capitalism in the eighteenth century. Easier to describe than to define, mercantilism is characterized by concepts, policies, and practices predicated on the existence of more centralized, territorially based, politicaladministrative institutions (a state). A related concept is bullionism, which holds that a state’s financial strength and prestige rested in precious metals such as gold and silver (Rempel n.d.). Bullionism produced a cascade of other economic expectations and practices, including the need to export more goods than are imported, the need for economic self-sufficiency and foreign markets, and the belief that domestic production by a large labor force was important for both food and taxes (ibid.). These principles clearly relate to subsequent European military, commercial, and colonization efforts of expansion: mercantile ambitions were the driving force underlying the European voyages of exploration beginning in the fifteenth century (Hooker 1996; Wolf 1982). My interest here is in the feudal/capitalist transition and in the period roughly from 1450 to 1800, in terms of the unleashing (or not) of capitalist forces in southern Peru and the region’s integration into the world-economy. From the beginning of Iberian expansion into what is now South America, this southern continent was “part of the world capitalist economy, though not necessarily itself capitalist” (McCreery 2000:5). Why focus on wine? Wine has been produced in two distinct economic systems, domestic/subsistence/ polyculture and political/commercial/monoculture (Unwin 1991:11). Because sustained production in the latter mode emerged in postmedieval/early modern Europe, wine production in early colonial South America is a particularly appropriate context to investigate this transition. Here we can examine changing labor systems, incorporation of innovations, and rapid colonial

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commoditization of wine as these processes accompanied and accommodated the creation of new capitalist political and economic structures. Capitalism and Its Socioeconomic Elements Most broadly, capitalism is a complex of interrelated, power-based, social relations and practices that varied from century to century and culture to culture. Its study has been particularly associated with Marxist thought and concepts of class conflict, industrialization, and factory production (Johnson 1996:7). Mark Leone (1999:4) defines the social relations of capitalism in terms of the power relations among resources, or “capital” (land, raw materials, money, property, goods); private owners (a.k.a. capitalists) of the vast majority of those resources as opposed to communal ownership; and wage workers, who lack these resources and sell their labor (as a commodity) to capitalists to make a living. With regard to the archaeological study of capitalism, a key component is socioeconomic relations: “Capitalist society is characterized by owners, governments, and their agents continuously introducing technical changes that alter the structure of labor, and pushing these changes into areas, cultures, and classes where they did not exist before, or where they become intensified” (Leone 1999:4). Capitalism emphasizes economic growth, expansion (frequently exploitative), commoditization, and objectification, the goal being profit and the creation of more wealth and power (hegemony). Clearly, unequal access to resources has characterized human groups for millennia, leading to unequal power relations between and among individuals, groups, and institutions. But capitalism, with its increasing alienation of the means of production, especially land, created entirely new spatial logics of social and economic relations: new identities—of capitalists versus workers; new relations of power and domination; new materialized social realities; and new kinds of spatialized identity politics (Keith and Pile 1993b:2–4). A second important component of an archaeology of capitalism is technology and material objects or commodities: how technology is incorporated into surplus production and how material objects “are produced, circulated and consumed and the social and economic values people place upon them” during their use-lives (Johnson 1996:6; Leone 1999:17–18). Many kinds of material things may be considered commodities in a politicoeconomic sense, that is, as having not only use value (wine is a pleasant drink) but also exchange value (wine can be traded for other goods). Influenced by the Annales School of historians, the study of things—whether identified as

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artifacts, commodities, or material culture—is increasingly based on viewing them as active agents (Latour 2005) in creating cultural meanings (Giddens 1981), and as having social lives (Appadurai 1986) and active voices (Beaudry, Cook, and Mrozowski 1991). Finally, capitalism is also a “way of thinking” about (Hooker 1996) and an ideology of (Burke 1999:226–230; Leone 1999:6–7) these relations and practices, which are situated in the European Enlightenment. Capitalism is fundamentally individualistic and future-directed, based on the idea of progress (economic growth) through increasingly productive labor and rational calculation. Perhaps most significantly for archaeologists, capitalism created a distinct consumer culture that signifies modernity, distances producers from consumers, and leads to people’s identification with objects (“commodity fetishism”). Moquegua’s early colonial experience must be understood in this ambiguous context. The task of an archaeology of capitalism is to discover the newly arisen identities and power relations, and materializations of both, as well as the variable patterns of access to the resources conferring power, to understand why they changed over time and how they meshed with profit motives. More specifically, historical archaeologists working in an archaeology of capitalism framework must achieve three objectives (Leone 1999:19): (1) identify the workings of capitalism (“capital extraction, alienation, and supply and demand”); (2) determine how these enter into communities and bring about culture change; and (3) develop an understanding of the implications of these in daily activities—for example, the changing nature of work (McCreery 2000). Industrial archaeology investigates the physical structures associated with the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution and its expansion through subsequent centuries. Less reliant on traditional excavation, industrial archaeology is more concerned with the spatial aspects of capitalism and the meanings given to places: “the discovery, listing, recording and, where appropriate, the preservation of the physical remains of past economic and social activity” (Minchinton 1983:125). Since beginning in Britain in the 1950s, industrial archaeology has evolved multiple goals and meanings depending on who is practicing it and where. It may refer strictly to the post-1750 period of the Euro-American world; to the archaeology of any industry, regardless of date; to heritage management—the documentation and preservation of the landscapes created by industry (Minchinton 1983); or to twentieth-century globalization (see Beaudry 2005; Casella 2005:3–8; Casella and Symonds 2005; Hardesty 2000; Palmer 1990)—or it may be specifically concerned with the

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use of technology or mechanical power in production and “processes governed explicitly by principles of engineering and science” (Gordon and Malone 1994:15). Regardless of these definitions, what is perhaps most striking about recent trends in industrial archaeology is an emphasis on consumer behavior with regard to goods that, although mass-produced, may be invested with multiple social meanings. These meanings occur on diverse scales, and may vary throughout the objects’ use-lives and statuses of consumers (for example, colonists vis-à-vis indigenous occupants in colonial contexts, and kin groups within each). wine and alcohol Study of Moquegua’s colonial viti-vinicultural agro-industry also can be situated in the growing anthropological and archaeological literature theorizing the relations among feasting, food and drink, and power (e.g., Dietler and Hayden 2001). Food (including drink) is culturally defined by virtue of the selection of ingredients, techniques of preparation, styles of presentation, behavioral expectations, and contexts of consumption (Dietler 2006:232). Consequently, food is a “versatile and highly charged symbolic medium” (ibid.: 222), intimately connected to the formation and expression of personal and cultural identities and memories (Dietler 2007; Holtzman 2006; Scholliers 2001; Twiss 2007; Wilson 2005). Until the 1970s, anthropologists had little interest in the cultural context of alcohol use (Heath 1987a). Michael Dietler (2006:230, 231) refers to an early “alcohol-as-pathology literature” and a prevailing attitude in which wine and alcohol were “demonized” and seen as “a kind of antifood” as a consequence of “the recent Euro-American . . . urban-industrial social order and the demands of capitalist work discipline.” Currently, however, there exists a substantial anthropological literature on the role of alcohol—primarily beer, but also wine—and ingestion of ritual inebriants (e.g., Douglas 1987a; McGovern 2003; Moore 1989). This literature addresses the contexts of production and consumption of alcoholic beverages (and other foods) as components of creating social relations through ritual, feasting, and the meanings attached to these drinks. Certain patterns of drinking alcohol trace the shift in labor and distinctions of work and leisure that accompanied industrial capitalism (Douglas 1987b:8; Gusfield 1987). The consumption of alcoholic beverages is marked, in most societies, by rules of inclusion and exclusion about who can drink what, how much, 17

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where, and with whom they can drink it (Douglas 1987b:8–9; Heath 1982:63). These rules tend to pertain most specifically to people of different statuses, but also to male versus female and young versus old. In many societies, fermented beverages are produced domestically (e.g., beers made from maize, manioc, bananas; wines from rice, dates) and may constitute significant portions of the diet, consumed throughout the day by the entire household, young and old. Consumption patterns of beer are often contrasted—worldwide, and over the millennia—with those of wine: wine was an exclusionary beverage of elites; beer was the inclusive drink of the masses. Indigenous Andean South America is a beer-drinking society, with regular consumption of maize beer, or chicha (Cobo 1983:28; Cooper 1949:539–541; Dillehay 2003; Doughty 1979; Moore 1989; Nicholson 1960; Orlove and Bauer 1997b). Low in alcohol content and high in certain nutrients (protein and vitamin C), chicha is widely considered a food and large quantities are expected to be served as a gesture of reciprocity for communal labor, particularly work parties on the lands of native leaders, or kurakas (Doughty 1979:69; Van Buren 1996:346). Supplying and drinking chicha, whether in small groups or community festivals, are elements of rites of passage, means of reinforcing social and power relations, and ways to promote solidarity. Drunkenness in such circumstances “tends to be either rare or an occasional deliberate, approved, and socially contextualized event,” albeit sometimes leading to fighting (Heath 1982:71; also Cooper 1949:544–545). Patterns of, and rules about, imbibing inebriants constitute identity markers and are of particular interest in situations of contacts between people of different cultures. The two cultures may have different substances, including alcohol, entailing different rules of decorum. Consumption, as Dietler (2005:64–65) reminds us, “is a process of structured improvisation that continually materializes cultural order by also dealing with alien objects and practices through either transformative appropriation and assimilation or rejection.” How does this “process of structured improvisation” work itself out over time, given the shifting circumstances of power and identity in a colonial situation? How are the roles and rules relating to production and consumption of alcoholic beverages negotiated and renegotiated? From the beginnings of the Spanish colonial enterprise in the Americas, alcohol “marked clear divisions between native and European populations” (Orlove and Bauer 1997b:121). Indigenous Andean elites and commoners alike drank beer, which was produced in homes and by the state; the Spaniards drank wine, which was a commodity produced and sold for profit. The adoption of a new form of drinking—as, for example, wine by native Andeans

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—is not uncommon in contact situations, where it becomes a “diacritical” symbol of the status of indigenous elites (Dietler 1990:379). Wine helped construct boundaries of identities between elites and nonelites, for example through patron–client relationships (Dietler 2006:237). Thus in colonial situations like Moquegua, wine—its production, commoditization, trade, consumption, taxation, and relation to secondary industries—is an instrument of power and an active agent (literally, through its psychotropic properties) of cultural transformation. Food in general and wine in particular have been “a consistently prominent material medium for the enactment of colonialism,” and therefore have considerable potential to illuminate “colonial situations and their transformative effects on identity” (Dietler 2007:219). Wine production and trade have been important components of imperial economies since Roman times and perhaps earlier. Compared to beer, wine and especially brandy have greater potential to participate in commodity circulation because they can be stored without spoiling for longer periods (ibid.: 239). the present volume: caveats In the late 1980s, when the Moquegua Bodegas Project was carried out, the anthropological contexts for “theorizing wine” and its role in colonial encounters did not exist, and thus the Bodegas Project was undertaken virtually in a theoretical vacuum. The major theoretical positions that could be brought to bear were variants of center–periphery models (including the world-system and dependency) and old concepts such as acculturation and transculturation related to culture contacts. Similarly, historical archaeology had little if any theory behind it (see Orser 1996:12–16; 2010) and a distinct Ibero-American archaeology did not exist. The archaeology of capitalism was in its infancy, as was industrial archaeology, and the scant anthropological work on alcohol focused primarily on medical studies (Heath 1987b). Fortunately, these then-nascent archaeologies have blossomed in the twenty years since Bodegas Project fieldwork was completed and they now provide a rich interpretive framework for this narrative. My interest in the consumption of wine and brandy in colonial southern Peru does not center on cultural patterns, habits, and contexts of drinking and feasting. Nor do I systematically address the introduction of a foreign food (wine, brandy) to the native peoples of the Andes and the subsequent processes of its incorporation into indigenous structures of religion, power, and social identity. Unlike most ethnohistorical or anthropological explorations 19

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of the Andean oikumene in Colonial times, my focus is not on indigenous populations and subalterns but rather on the European colonists themselves. My aim is to position Moquegua’s Colonial-period history and material culture within a broader cultural landscape. Because neither wine nor historical/ colonial archaeology has been intensively explored from an anthropological viewpoint in Peruvian studies to date, I devote considerable attention to establishing the contexts for Moquegua’s colonial experience. It is within these contexts—theoretical (part I), historical (part II), and vinicultural (part III)—that the material heritage of the Moquegua valley (part IV) must be understood and interpreted. The specialized archaeological data and analyses overviewed in part IV have been extensively discussed in earlier publications by me and by other project members, but thorough contextualization has been lacking. This narrative is one of microhistory (Brooks, DeCorse, and Walton 2008; also Orser 2010:118–119). Its focus is on individuals, small social groups (households, families), and their networks and institutions, inhabiting a small space and place: Moquegua. Colonial Moquegua’s story situates itself at the intersection of the local with the global and the entangled processes of colonialism, incipient capitalism, and commoditization. In telling this story, I am attempting to “see bifocally”: capitalism may require a “double surveillance of space” in considering both local profits and remote markets (Peters 1997:76). My overall perspective is decidedly pericentric. My approach is also diachronic: I look at both Spain and the Moquegua valley before the 1533 conquest of Peru, then concentrate on the events of Spanish settlement of the latter. I explore the valley’s changing roles as frontier, periphery, and semiperiphery over a period of roughly three centuries on the fringes of Spanish imperial expansion. I am interested in processes and agents: of initial European colonization, of the establishment of a viti-vinicultural agro-industry, and of the roles of wine and brandy as commodities in the social and political economies of the valley and the region. These activities were played out during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, with the industry’s denouement in the late nineteenth century.

theory

pa r t i @$2

Background and Deep Context

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background and deep context

Part I of Vintage Moquegua sets the scene for this microhistorical narrative, providing the background contexts within which the valley’s emerging wine industry can be understood. Chapter 2 establishes the theoretical perspectives for interpreting the events and processes associated with the Colonial-period wine industry: those of Moquegua as a frontier on the periphery of both an imperial colony and an emerging capitalist worldsystem; and those of change in material culture and technology, and the agents—human and nonhuman—that participated in such changes. Moquegua’s colonial development and its wine and brandy industry were shaped by the heritage of its Spanish invaders, by the indigenous peoples living there, and by their interactions. Chapter 3 reviews the conditions of the core-state, Spain. Grapevines were brought to the Iberian Peninsula in preRoman times, and it was through Roman imperial influence that the wine industry—and the Spanish preference for urban life—flourished, especially in the south. Surviving eight centuries of Muslim domination and slow Christian reconquest, vineyards and wine-making in medieval Iberia were primarily domestic, small-scale, unspecialized, local commercial enterprises. Chapter 4 introduces the physical setting of peripheral Moquegua. It builds on the premise that the histories of colonial peripheries and frontiers are contoured by their physical environment, particularly land and other capital resources. Such resources include the indigenous inhabitants of these regions, whose labor and production systems are almost inevitably appropriated and exploited as part of the colonial process.

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2

theory Peripheries, Frontiers, Actors, and Innovations

Theory, if it is sufficiently rich, suggests what to study; if theory is lacking, it is difficult to know what (not) to study. —john c. hudson, “Theory and Methodology in Comparative Frontier Studies,” 1977

Whether ancient or modern, the large, territorially expansionist states known as empires hold an enduring fascination for scholars. The workings of empires, colonization, and colonialism are pervasive themes in the literature of the social and historical sciences (e.g., Alcock et al. 2001; Doyle 1986), with varied methods, concepts, starting points, and perspectives applied to their investigation. I bring four complementary theoretical perspectives to the study of Moquegua’s early colonial history: world-systems analysis (including the related archaeologies of capitalism and industrial development), frontiers, actor-networks, and diffusion of innovation. Bodegas Project fieldwork was not undertaken in the context of most of these theories. They are adopted here because, as the epigraph suggests, they are sufficiently rich to suggest what to study, albeit retrospectively, and provide a framework for organizing the description and the interpretation of project data. world-systems: centers and peripheries World-systems theory was proposed by social historian Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 1980) to explain the operation of a “world-economy” independent of any single political unit such as an empire. The world-economy came into existence in Europe during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and continued to flourish—although the core-states fluctuated—because of the incorporation of modern capitalist principles and new technology (Wallerstein 1974:16). Variables of labor mobilization and mechanisms of surplus accumulation are among the key attributes of this system. Ibero-America was economically peripheral in the developing capitalist world-system and 23

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in some senses a frontier during its colonial history. The economies of colonial Latin America cannot be reliably classed as either feudal or capitalist; rather, they followed their own courses of participation in the capitalist system (McCreery 2000:5). Concepts and Critiques Fundamental concepts in the world-systems model as originally proposed are the notions of core (or core-state), periphery, and semiperiphery. The core– periphery dichotomy, as used in earlier dependency theory in Latin America (Frank 1966, 1967; also Boutilier 1989), represents the product of a process called “development of underdevelopment.” In world-systems analysis more generally, the processes of imperial expansion created and maintained asymmetrical power relations—an axial division of labor (Wallerstein 2004:91)— between a politically and economically dominant core-state or center and its spatially and culturally distant peripheries. Peripheral regions are characterized by sociopolitical inequality, cultural pluralism, and economic disadvantage: they are technologically undeveloped and exploited for raw resources and bulk goods, while at the same time dependent on centers for social, economic, and political services. Cores and peripheries are separated, both geographically and conceptually in this model, by an intermediate zone, or semiperiphery, characterized by clinal variability in a host of economic, political, and sociocultural institutions (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1991:21, 30; Slicher van Bath 1979; Wallerstein 1974:349–350, 102–103). Semiperipheries may be spatially and temporally intermediate zones between greater and lesser complexity, and are likely to be areas of creative hybridity in material culture (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1991:30). Geographically external to the core–semiperiphery–periphery system, but often interacting with it in some way, are other societies that may be referred to as external arenas or hinterlands. For example, the external arena of a world-economy consists of other systems with which a core-state trades, primarily in “preciosities,” or luxury goods (Wallerstein 1974:302). A hinterland is an area that may play a role in circulation of surplus accumulation, and its resources (including human labor) may be tapped by the system, but it remains socio-politically autonomous (Gills and Frank 1991:87). Marginal areas are those “disengaged” from the processes of differentiation and specialization that exist in relation to more developed centers (Schneider 1977:21). Critics of world-systems perspectives over the last forty years have identified numerous flaws: Eurocentrism; essentialized binarism of active, exploitative cores versus passive peripheries; focus on basic rather than a range of

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goods; inattention to local systems; top–down perspective; assumption of asymmetrical power relations; and more. Although a crucial early criticism was that the world-system model does not “work” in pre-capitalist contexts (for which, of course, it was not formulated), decades of such applications have led to its reworking from world-systems theory into a more broadly applicable comparative world-systems analysis (Kardulias and Hall 2008; Wallerstein 2004). Heuristically, world-systems have the advantage of being dynamic and diachronically flexible analytical units: societies may participate in or be “incorporated” by (Hall 1986) the capitalist world-economy at different levels and to different degrees at different points in their historical trajectories. At the various levels, societies played “specific economic roles, developed different class structures, used consequently different modes of labor control, and profited unequally from the workings of the system” (Wallerstein 1974:162). Whereas core areas have long been foci of historians’ and archaeologists’ interests in imperialism, capitalism, globalization, and the operations of political economies, regardless of theoretical perspectives or models (see Hall and Chase-Dunn 1993), increasing attention is now given to the roles of local and peripheral political economies in global systems and the impact of global forces upon them. A Multiscalar Approach Wallerstein’s formulation was specifically structured around the vast network of political, economic, and social relations of postmedieval European exploration, colonialism, and emerging capitalism, within which Moquegua’s role on the periphery of the Spanish empire has been virtually invisible. How might the world-system/-economy model in particular or center–periphery distinctions in general be deployed to illuminate Moquegua’s colonial experience? Two little-explored elements of the model are particularly useful: one is internal mobility; another is nesting. With respect to mobility, societies participating in a world-system or world-economy might “pulse” through cycles of expansion and contraction (Hall 1999:9). They might experience promotion or demotion to different levels: “The external arena of one century often becomes the periphery of the next—or its semiperiphery. But then, too, core-states might become semiperipheral and semiperipheral ones peripheral” (Wallerstein 1974:350). Thus, Spain (along with neighboring Portugal) flowered as a core-state only briefly and early in the era of European expansion. Late sixteenth-century disasters (such as a declaration of bankruptcy and the British defeat of the 25

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Armada) dimmed Spain’s star and as it declined the Netherlands ascended as a core-state. Spain had devolved into a semiperiphery by the late seventeenth century as a consequence of wars and an economic depression, and remained there during the eighteenth century before sinking to peripheral status (Wallerstein 1974:196, 315; 1980:187–193). With respect to nesting, world-systems may be thought of as “a whole chain of constellations of metropolis and satellites [that relate] all parts of the whole system from its metropolitan center in Europe . . . to the farthest outpost in the Latin American countryside” (Frank 1966:20). So, for example, the Spanish empire may be envisioned as comprising a nested hierarchy of smaller world-systems, each surrounded by intermediate zones (e.g., secondary cities) and peripheries (Slicher van Bath 1979:66–69; also ChaseDunn 1988:59; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1992:89–91; Rice 1998:46; Wallerstein 1974:86). Mobility and nesting facilitate diachronic analyses of varying levels of social, political, and economic hierarchies over a broad geopolitical landscape. Thus Moquegua’s situation can be explored by narrowing the focus stepwise through a nested arrangement of core–periphery relations. Level 1 of this hierarchy is the overall European capitalist world-system (table 2.1). The “level 2” center–periphery system of interest is the Spanish colonial empire (Deagan 2001): a subsystem within the European world-system. Spain sits at its core (a role held until the colonies achieved independence in the early nineteenth century) and the American colonies are semiperipheries. The West Indies and Hispaniola, whose small, dispersed native populations were eliminated almost immediately after conquest by disease and rapacious exploitation, together with later settlements of the southwestern United States “borderlands,” represent peripheries. Manila is an external arena. Within this level 2 system, economic and political gradations and transformations can be recognized that arose as a function of time, distance from the Spanish corestate, and surplus production related to the levels of sociopolitical and economic complexity of the indigenous populations in each region. Narrowing our vision, Ibero-America can be considered a level 3 core– periphery system. Here after about 1530 there were two cores or centers (cf. Slicher van Bath 1979:66–69, who spoke of four center–periphery “complexes”). One was the audiencia (supreme court) established in Mexico in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, in the center of a former indigenous quasi-empire (Aztec Mexico); the other was the audiencia of Lima in the Viceroyalty of Peru, or Birú, heartland of the former Inka empire. These two cores were

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Table 2.1. Nested Levels of Center–Periphery Systems in the Spanish-Colonial World and Southern Peru Level 1

2

3

System European world-system

Spanish colonial empire Ibero-America

Center(s)

Semiperiphery

Peripheries

Various

Various

Latin America

Iberia (16th cent.)

Northern Europe

Latin America

Northern Europe

Spain (18th cent.)

Spain

Viceroyalty of New Spain

Caribbean

Viceroyalty of Peru

Philippines

Viceroyalty of Mexico

Central America

Panama Philippines Caribbean

Viceroyalty of Peru

Panama Bogotá Cartagena

Chile Paraguay La Plata

4

Viceroyalty of Peru

Lima

Quito Trujillo Arequipa Potosí La Paz Cusco

Chile La Plata Paraguay

5

Southwest Peru*

Arequipa

Chucuito Arica Potosí

Moquegua

*The role of cities in this area was transformed over time through administrative “promotion” (e.g., Moquegua), and economic (Potosí) or demographic (Chucuito) decline.

not of equal rank, although interpretations of their relative stature are contradictory. According to Clarence Haring (1963:82), Peru was “pre-eminent in the minds of Spaniards” and “the most precious of the crown’s American possessions, the source of most of its wealth.” Others suggest that Mexico enjoyed a more privileged rank in terms of trade and governance than did Peru: “During the 16th century Mexico behaved towards Peru as a metropole towards its colony” (Wallerstein 1974:189, quoting Chaunu). Elsewhere in

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this level 3 system, Cuba and Hispaniola in the Caribbean were semiperipheries by 1550, but everything else is satellite or periphery (or fringe; Lockhart and Schwartz 1983:253–254, map 8; Slicher van Bath 1979: map 1). A century later, the two cores of the Ibero-American level 3 system had modified their territorial boundaries and several of the formerly peripheral regions in the viceroyalties had been “promoted” to semiperipheries with formal administrative titles (Lockhart and Schwartz 1983: map 9). In the Viceroyalty of Peru, for example, these include all or part of the audiencias of Santa Fe de Bogotá and Chile, with other parts of Chile, Paraguay, and the La Plata district constituting peripheries. Telescoping our view still more sharply, the Viceroyalty of Peru is level 4 in the nested model. With its territory initially mapped over the former Inka empire in the Andes Mountains, the viceroyalty encompassed nearly all of the South American continent. In this vast area, factors of distance, topography, history, and indigenous and imposed administrative units created unique, smaller hierarchies of internal center–periphery networks and boundaries. For example, the viceregal capital, Lima (Ciudad de los Reyes, City of Kings), on the central Pacific coast, functioned as the core of political and ecclesiastical administration. Economically, Lima was an entrepôt for the entire western system, as crown-authorized arrivals from Spain (via Panama)—and also illegal shipping from Mexico—docked in Lima’s port of Callao, both to bring Spanish goods and immigrants into the colony and to transport passengers and silver bullion back to the homeland. Lima merchants held a trade monopoly (along with Panama) in the viceroyalty until the late 1600s (Andrien 1985:16, 26, 205; see Lockhart 1968:77–95). Secondary administrative, economic, ecclesiastical, and demographic centers were rapidly established in the Andes in the decades after conquest. These cities held dominion over various institutional jurisdictions (audiencias, dioceses), as well as serving to reproduce the essential conditions of urban life for large populations of European settlers. Other areas played different roles. The highly populated Lake Titicaca basin might represent an “affluent production zone” (Smith and Berdan 2003:26). The rich and populous silver mining center of Upper Peru (modern Bolivia) might be considered a resource extraction zone (ibid.: 2–29), although the raw materials mined there were not used to produce key commodities. It was a type of economic core, despite holding no institutional or administrative functions, because “a belt of agricultural and cattle haciendas” grew up around the mines to provision them (Florescano, cited in Wallerstein 1980:152).

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What is now southern Peru can be considered a semiperiphery in this level 4 system throughout the Colonial period. However, it had its own hierarchy of provincial centers and peripheries, constituting a “level 5 regional system.” In this part—and at this level—of the viceroyalty, political, ecclesiastical, and economic hierarchies were distinct. Arequipa was the primary colonial administrative center in the southwest, one of three fiscal centers, or cajas (Brown 1986:17). The area’s economic role was “relatively insignificant” through the Hapsburg-ruled seventeenth century, however, until Spain’s new Bourbon dynasty “moved to bring southern Peru under close imperial supervision and to make the region . . . productive within the Spanish colonial system” (Brown 1986:7–8). This appears to be another instance of promotion, this time of the city of Arequipa from peripheral to semiperipheral status within the level 4 system. In the rural reaches of the level 5 system, on the peripheries of southern Peru’s urban centers of Arequipa, La Plata, and Potosí, lay the agricultural frontiers that supported them. One such rural supply area was Moquegua. frontiers as places and processes Frontier theory (like world-system theory) is embedded in the framework of Western, Euro-American historical discourse, in particular that of Frederick Jackson Turner (1893), whose ethnocentric, environmentalist thesis has prompted a large literature of anti-Turnerian, neo-Turnerian, and postTurnerian offerings (Burns 1989). As frontier studies have been pursued by historians, geographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, and others, the terminology has grown muddled, the confusion increased by engagement with boundaries, borders, and borderlands. Frontier Definitions One definition of a frontier is “a zone of varying depth marking either the political division between two countries or the division between the settled and uninhabited areas within a country” (Donnan and Wilson 1999:45). This definition is narrowly phrased in terms of modern nation-states, the first part construing frontiers as formal political boundaries and borders, usually backed by military forces. These are sites and symbols of the power of the state (Donnan and Wilson 1999:1, 13; also Wendl and Rösler 1999:6–10). Such a definition lacks broader relevance for premodern and nonstate contexts, for which frontiers are better defined as “geographic zones of interaction between two or more distinctive cultures” (Weber and Rausch 1994a: 29

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xiv; Hall 2009:25). However, this definition excludes situations in which a group (or “culture”) enters vacant or almost vacant terrain (see Moore 2001). Although historical trajectories of population growth and expansion have nearly eliminated isolated wilderness areas, uninhabited terrain must be incorporated conceptually into any analytically and chronologically useful definition, especially for archaeologists. Thus Lars Rodseth (2005:86–89) suggests two spatial categories of frontier: a “remote or underpopulated wilderness” and a “contact zone.” Some typologies distinguish frontiers from borderlands and describe categories of each (Martinez 1994; Wendl and Rösler 1999:9–10; cf. Naum 2010:101, 103). Frontiers may be characterized by temporal change as unstable, enclosing (usually stable), and expanding (Manzano Moreno 1999:35–36). They may be described as external (colonial) or internal (interstitial; noncolonial) (see Kopytoff 1989, 1999); the former are consequences of state expansionism. Such frontiers may be considered the outer reaches—the front tier—of a more powerful or central state, which may or may not interact (or to different degrees) with a preexisting and generally unrelated sociopolitical entity that may or may not be a state. They are distinguished by the extension of the institutions and practices—social, political, economic, religious, linguistic—characterizing that central entity and distinguishing it from whatever may be encountered beyond. In the early historiography of Euro-American colonialism, a “frontier” was essentially “a territory owned by white men pushing the limits of wilderness” to expand civilization (Naum 2010:103). More recent views see the frontier as a “cultural membrane” separating “indigenous and European cultures. Influences pass in both directions, but the dominant pressure is from the European side. . . . Values meet and mix. . . . The two societies compete for and fight over access to natural resources” (Slatta 1990:19). This idea of “permeability” of borders and frontiers is crucial, because it highlights the interactions among peoples on both sides. However, assessing the degree of permeability of frontiers in longitudinal studies is difficult because, in the case of aggressively expansionist states such as sixteenth-century Spain, frontiers are constantly moving and advancing over areas that once might have served as temporary borders, boundaries, or barriers. Space, Place, and Process Frontiers are moments in space (conceptually defined) and place (culturally defined). “Space” may sometimes mean “where things are not located” (Orser 1996:136), that is, open or negative space, but more often it is considered in

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terms of both an abstract and a concrete ordering of human perceptions, activities, social relations, and their physical settings deployed over the terrain (ibid.: 132–137). Geophysical characteristics, such as topography, water resources and hydrography, climate and rainfall regimes, and resources (plant, animal, and mineral), are important to the creation of meaning and contour the paths of frontier history, but do not determine it. Land and mineral resources constitute capital, the foundation of wealth in a capitalist society. For anthropologists, spaces are not merely stages, “inert containers,” or academic devices (Rodman 1992:641; Keith and Pile 1993b) in which we observe people playing out their lives. Instead, we are interested in them as places: socially constructed, “politicized, culturally relative, historically specific,” with multiple meanings for multiple actors (Rodman 1992:641; see also Lefebvre 1991). Places are lived, meaning-full, and “experienced” spaces that “come into being through praxis” (Rodman 1992:642; Gupta and Ferguson 1997a; Keith and Pile 1993c). A frontier should be conceptualized not simply as place but also as process: places in which agency is exercised through distinctive activities and transformations. Frontiers are loci of contact and interaction among groups that are usually unrelated with respect to language, political organization, belief systems, economy, and other cultural variables (Kopytoff 1989; Lightfoot and Martínez 1995; McCarthy 2008; Parker 2006; Parker and Rodseth 2005; Weber and Rausch 1994a: xiv). Interactions may be controlled, to greater or lesser degrees, by center-state policy, meaning that frontiers, like borders, are “liminal zones in which residents, wayfarers and the state are continually contesting their roles and their natures” (Donnan and Wilson 1999:64). Characterized by multilocality and multivocality (Rodman 1992), frontiers and borders are culturally defined places where shifting personal, social, ethnic, and national identities are recursively negotiated (Anderson 1996; Barth 1969; Hall 2009:37–39; Wendl and Rösler 1999:15–17). Study of such places has led to a rejection of essentialized concepts of national or ethnic identities and a search for new concepts to replace outmoded notions of one-way, linear processes of acculturation (Wendl and Rösler 1999:1). In the larger context of world-systems theory, the study of frontiers can contribute to an understanding of “the ways in which many world-systemic contexts shape local human agency. Conversely, the study of these highly localized human practices offers ways to gain insights to how individual actions constantly reconstruct worldsystems” (Hall 2009:25). Economically, processes of exploitation of frontiers’ capital resources lead to their categorization as extractive (mining, logging) or productive (agrarian, industrial). 31

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Table 2.2. Dichotomous Characterizations of Frontiers Metrocentric Perspective

Pericentric Perspective

Place (patterned traits) Static Passive recipient Closed Insular Exclusive Stagnant Isolated wilderness

Processes Dynamic Active agency Open Cosmopolitan Inclusive Innovative, competitive Contact zone

Scholarly expectations of behavior in peripheries and frontiers are strongly dependent on perspective (see note 2). Historically, the typical perspective is “metrocentric”: situated in the core, or metropole, of an empire or state and scanning outward toward its distant settlements or colonies. An alternative— “pericentric”—view, situated in an outer extreme of the empire and viewing its interactions with the center, is less common, although it is increasing with the growing interest in modern borderlands studies and efforts at creating typologies (Martínez 1994; Wendl and Rösler 1999). Classifications of frontier situations have often highlighted distinctions that, while meaningful, emphasize artificial dichotomies depending on these perspectives, and these are particularly relevant for shaping expectations about sources of change and agency (Rice 1998:49–53). Presenting such characterizations and expectations as polarities (table 2.2) obscures the greater likelihood that characteristics of frontiers and peripheries and the behavior of the people within them represent continua of variability. Nonetheless, some binary distinctions may be not simply perspectival but empirically “real”: some frontiers may indeed be open wilderness while most others are zones of cultural contact. And the applicability of these descriptors will change through time as frontiers are settled and eventually incorporate boundaries, borders, peripheries, or even centers. In adopting a pericentric viewpoint, I focus on the characteristics in the right-hand column of table 2.2: I consider frontiers and peripheries as open, dynamic, inclusive places of interaction where active agency and negotiation of social, political, and economic statuses and identities lead to change and innovation. My spatial starting point is southern Peru, specifically Moquegua

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and the Río Osmore drainage, as a frontier of the Spanish colonial empire and its transformations through time. Relevant interactions relate to appropriating land and establishing the viti-vinicultural agro-industry, and thus are social (human–human), agricultural (human–environment), material (human–technology), and symbolic (human–spiritual, or religio-ritual). Latin American Frontiers Frontier studies played an early role, though not a lasting one, in early Latin American and particularly South American historiography (Aiton 1940; Belaúnde 1923; Bolton 1921; Webb 1951; Zavala 1957; also Bushnell 1992; Hennessy 1978; Weber and Rausch 1994a, 1994b). Yet South America is the penultimate of a long sequence of Spanish frontier experiences, ranging from being a frontier to creating them (chapter 3). “One of the most extraordinary features of Spanish American life,” said Isaiah Bowman (1931:305), “is the persistence of frontier conditions through the centuries since the Conquest. It is still a continent of pioneer fringes.” Given the internal continuity of frontier conditions and the shared heritage of Christian reconquest, concluded immediately before imperial expansion, it is rather ironic that Ibero-American societies lack a foundational “frontier myth” (Hennessy 1978:3; cf. Clementi 1994:143). The changing nature of the medieval frontiers between Christians/Castile and Muslim al-Andalus in Iberia has been parsed into chronological intervals: 755–1031 (Manzano Moreno 1999); 1085–1350 (González Jiménez 1989); and 1350–1480 (López de Coca 1989; MacKay 1989). Frontiers were perceived from two sides, Christian and Islamic, and had negative connotations in both cultures. For Christians, whose frontiers were unstable and expanding (Manzano Moreno 1999:37), “the dominant image of the frontier was a desert . . . a place that was uninhabited, due to the conditions following from the Islamic conquest, and uninhabitable given prevailing conditions of insecurity and threat of incursion” (Glick 1979:58). James the Conqueror, who defeated Valencia in 1238, saw the frontera as “a region of warfare and peril to the [Christian] realms” (Burns 1989:322). For Muslims, frontiers were enclosing (Manzano Moreno 1999:37) and defensive. They saw frontiers in militant and ideological (rather than territorial) terms, as the limits of (or entry points to) Muslim rule which must be safeguarded by rulers (including through jihād) against breaches by the unbelievers lying beyond (ibid.: 39–46). In addition, there may be underlying semantic differences regarding “frontier” relating to vocabulary, structures, and concepts (Hennessy 1978:7; also Kristof 1959; Naum 2010:103; Power 1999; Weber and Rausch 1994a: xiii). In 33

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the North American mind, popular and scholarly, a frontier connotes limitless free space (“Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier”) whereas in Latin America and Europe the word frontera refers to modern nation-state boundaries (also límites) requiring official passport and immigration controls. North Americans identify these as relatively static edges or borders. Such perspectives have conditioned research orientations, as North American historians and geographers consider frontiers to offer social and economic opportunities for growth and innovation, rather than limits or barriers to such development. Yet another element behind the inattention to frontiers might relate to definitions of the proper domain of historiography. Unlike many European historians, who have well-developed interests in small-scale systems, local histories, peasant villages, and the like, until the late twentieth century Latin American historians tended to leave such topics to anthropologists and focus more on cities and large-scale phenomena. Thus “Great Tradition” histories of wealthy, urban regions—cores—were the focus of study, as opposed to “little tradition” histories of rural or agricultural regions, indigenous peoples, and related phenomena. The lack of a “frontier myth” in Ibero-America, in other words, may be more apparent than real, an artifact of the intellectual history and historiographic traditions of the region as much as a product of differing historical experience. If the Latin American experience of colonization and underdevelopment of the frontier was really so different from that of other continents, why is this so? And why has its study been so long disregarded? Many reasons—at least fifteen—have been suggested for the differences, and the degree to which they can be considered satisfactory explanations depends in large part on the theoretical contexts within which they are offered. Silvio Zavala (1943:3), for instance, explained the contrasts between Hispanic American and North American colonial experiences in terms of four major factors: the colonists came from different countries (Spain versus England); Latin American colonization began in the sixteenth century, whereas English colonization of North America took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by which time Europe had become a very different place; in Ibero-America the most important colonies were shaped by the characteristics of indigenous statelevel civilizations, which were absent in North America; and Spanish America incorporated from earliest times a multicultural heritage that included slaves, Jews, and Muslims. Additional reasons were suggested in a later analysis of frontiers that attempted to place them in broader theoretical and historical context (Hen-

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nessy 1978:16–18, 25). Thus Latin American frontiers may be characterized by a slow rate of in-migration; geographical obstacles to expansion and especially transportation (also Bowman 1931:305); and a lack of “free land,” as arable land was quickly converted to large latifundias instead of being settled in small rural homesteads (also Belaúnde 1923:203; Mariátegui 1971:39–40; Weber and Rausch 1994b). Frontiers were also “differentiated by availability of labour in varying forms,” whereas in the United States the stimulus was “opportunity.” Critically important in Ibero-America was the overall scarcity of the two primary factors that permit economic development, labor (death of indigenous populations through pandemics) and capital. And, finally, official Spanish policy toward its colonies emphasized repressive mercantilist restrictions on trade and various kinds of production. Further explanations can be found in a complex of historical and cultural as well as environmental factors: extreme physical distance from the homeland, especially for Andean South America; vast tracts of tropics—climate and vegetation—plus desert, as opposed to attractive potential farmland in temperate North America; and primary colonization that focused on exploitation of mineral wealth rather than a search for land for farming. Moreover, Spaniards accommodated and intermarried with native peoples, which was more rare in English colonies (Nugent 1994:73). Finally, ideology and values played a role: Ibero-American frontiers were characterized by resistance to innovation and expansion, cultivating instead a strongly conservative trend toward retention of the ideals and material trappings of peninsular culture (Hennessy 1978:25); above all they favored cities and urban life as opposed to rural settlement and homesteading. Frontier Models Many kinds of frontiers exist (e.g., Hennessy 1978). Some are defined by their activities or products, such as mining, cattle-ranching, agriculture (including coffee), and rubber frontiers (also Steffen 1980); others are distinguished by the ethnic or ideological affiliations of the inhabitants, such as the mission (Bolton 1960), Indian, maroon, and Anglo-Hispanic frontiers. These are descriptive characterizations, however, rather than predictive or explanatory models. Capitalist world-systems are said to have four kinds of frontiers or boundaries, based on flows of information, luxury goods, bulk goods, and politico-military interaction (Hall 1999:7, 11). A review (Rice 1998) of archaeologists’ models of imperial frontiers suggests that, although none was developed specifically for the historical archaeology of colonial Latin America,

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several hold promise for investigating changes in economic strategies, relations with the homeland, and social mobility. Three models are particularly useful for developing a series of expectations for Moquegua’s colonial situation; a fourth emerges from a study in contemporary Costa Rica. The “territorial-hegemonic” model of imperial expansion analyzes center– periphery political and economic relations on a continuum (D’Altroy 1992). This model, developed for the pre-Hispanic Inka but applicable to Spain’s colonies, focuses on the different trajectories resulting from imposing direct versus indirect strategies of production intensification in the periphery. Direct intensification strategies produce “marked changes in the organization of labor . . . new socioeconomic statuses [and] changes in land tenure systems” (ibid.: 21). Indirect intensification, on the other hand, involves “taxing mercantile activity or extracting staple goods from the populace” (ibid.). Territorial-hegemonic empires are high maintenance for the metropole: they require expensive investments in administrative control and security to ensure elevated levels of production of goods or extraction of raw materials (ibid.). However, investments in supply to the distant subject territories are kept minimal, especially in high-bulk, low-value goods, and colonies are expected to meet their needs through local production. The “frontier surplus flow model,” developed for the colonial northeastern U.S., proposes that differences between the core-state and frontier may be discrete (modular) or continuous (clinal) (Paynter 1982, 1985). To determine how surpluses flow in a frontier area and assess strategies of domination and resistance, four components must be analyzed: ecological relations, primary producers, regional elites, and homeland elites. The flow of surpluses among the elites is critical, as it allows assessment of socioeconomic strategies and changes in those strategies through time. Regional elites in the periphery may be characterized as either dependency or development elites. Dependency elites rely on maintaining ties to and support from homeland elites to uphold their status and the status quo, and are often locally unpopular with primary producers. Development elites, by contrast, are change agents: they gain and maintain status by fostering local economic development, align themselves with primary producers, and promote separation from the core and homeland elites. A third model, also based in colonial North America, draws on the differences among kinds of frontiers: agrarian, fur-trading, ranching, and mining (Steffen 1980). Relative isolation from (vs. interactions with) the homeland permitted these frontiers to be classed as insular or cosmopolitan, where different kinds of change, fundamental or modal, took place. Insular frontiers

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are often agrarian frontiers: typically distant from the homeland, well settled, economically diverse and self-sufficient, long term, and usually well adapted to local environmental conditions. They vary greatly by size and organization, as well as by orientation to either subsistence or market production (Leyburn 1935:5–6; Thompson 1973:14). Change is likely to be “fundamental”: deep and pervasive changes in basic institutions and the assumptions that underlie them (Steffen 1980: xi), and also “relatively slow, gradual, and expansive” (Hardesty 1985:225). So-called cosmopolitan frontiers, by contrast, are economically specialized, often industrial, short-term frontiers based on exploitation of distinct resources to profit the homeland, such as silver mining at Potosí. They maintain close integration with homeland culture and the chief interest of the settlers is in reproducing the material conditions of life in the core. This leads to substantial importation of core goods and relative standardization of material culture, with the result that changes are likely to be episodic, incremental, and modal, that is, outward changes in practice (Hardesty 1980–81; 1985:214, 225). Cosmopolitan frontiers differ depending on whether the local economy is extractive or productive, and this has specific implications for interactions with the local indigenous populace (if any) within them. Colonists may have little incentive for sustained interactions while engaged in extractive exploitation, but in cases of intensive production regimes they need more structured relations with native groups to be able to systematically exploit their labor (Rice 1998:60n2). The cosmopolitan frontiers of Ibero-American imperial expansion include a combined extractive-productive type that is both agrarian and industrial. These frontiers are particularly common in tropical regions, which may have resources or environmental conditions conducive to large-scale investments in crops unsuited to the temperate homeland, such as sugar, cotton, indigo, cacao, rubber, and tropical woods. Rather than call them cosmopolitan (based on social interactions), I prefer to call these exploitative or agro-industrial frontiers, underscoring their singular, capitalist economic foundations. The Ibero-American colonial enterprise differed considerably from that in North America because of two distinctive structures of production that played critical roles in local economies and world-systems: plantations and haciendas. Beginning as early as the late fifteenth-century settlement of the Canary Islands (see Fernández-Armesto 1982), plantations were a crucial component of agricultural economies, particularly those of sugar production, associated with colonial expansion. In speaking of early sugar plantations, Sidney Mintz (1985:48) acknowl37

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edged that although “the seventeenth century was preindustrial; and the idea that there might have been ‘industry’ on the colonial plantation before it existed in the homeland may seem heretical,” still sugar plantations represent “the closest thing to industry in the seventeenth century.” “Industry,” in Mintz’s sense, departs from its traditional meaning in economics, which has reference to mechanization and free labor. Cane fields and sugar mills were worked primarily by the manual labor of slaves. Yet these early plantations can be classed as agro-industrial because they combined agriculture and processing of its products under one authority, production and consumption were separated, and the worker was separated (or alienated) from the means of production (Mintz 1985:51, 52). In colonial Peru, wine and brandy came to be produced under the related but distinct system known as hacienda. Haciendas are distinguished from plantations by (among other things) differences in capitalization and marketing (see Wolf and Mintz 1957; Van Young 1983). They are negatively characterized by limited availability of capital, which may have significant implications for the kinds and impacts of innovations in production technology in this system (Wolf and Mintz 1957:393–394). A fourth model of frontier interaction can be elicited from a study of migrants in the twentieth-century frontier settlement of Pejibaye in central Costa Rica. Although traditional wisdom holds that upward mobility on a frontier is restricted to those who have substantial capital resources (i.e., land), three opportunities for upward mobility existed in Costa Rica: owning land, specializing as a retail merchant, and acting as a middleman in an agrarian business (Sewastynowitz 1994:179). Significantly, an inverse relationship was found between time of arrival and availability of land: in a new frontier, capital is scarce and land is abundant, but over time the situation reverses, with land increasingly occupied and developed, and therefore high priced (ibid.: 181). Thus “lack of initial capital can be compensated for by early arrival on the frontier, whereas, conversely, late arrival can be compensated for by greater initial capital” (ibid.: 180). In Pejibaye and other frontier areas, a twostep pattern of migration—early migration to one frontier to invest in land and improve it, and then taking those profits to invest in land on a second frontier—was a viable pathway to wealth. This strategy worked well in situations of free land; limitations are distance between frontiers (transportation costs), soil fertility, and administrative interference (ibid.: 184). Most models of frontiers and peripheries are relatively synchronic characterizations, not diachronic analyses of change through time. They are concerned with polarized contrasts with centers or cores, and semiperipheries rarely enter into these configurations. Given the critiques of core–periphery

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binaries, however, the semiperiphery concept could play a useful role. Christopher Chase-Dunn (1988:31; also Wallerstein 1974:349) sees the semiperiphery as a “fertile ground for social, organizational and technical innovation and as a strategic location for upward mobility and the establishment of new centers of resource control. Thus the semiperiphery is a structural position which often has developmental (or evolutionary) significance.” Semiperipheries are more likely than either cores or peripheries to stimulate innovation because they are places where elements from both can be creatively synthesized, less impeded by the “institutional baggage” of the core-state (see notes 2 and 6), and not as tightly administered as the periphery (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1991:30). material and technological change As in most archaeological investigations, the goals and objectives of this study are pursued through material culture and technology. Because one of the frontier processes of interest is identity and class construction, it is necessary to examine the material symbols of those identities and consider the social, political, and economic circumstances—such as degree of control or restriction—of their production, deployment, consumption, styles, assignment of meanings, and so on. How did people identify with commodities—like wine—such that they came to represent the social personae, power relations, and appropriation of resources unique to the Spanish colonial situation and emergent capitalism in southern Peru? How does material culture—objects, commodities, and their symbolism—intersect with ritual and politics? A related issue is that of change and innovation in material culture and technology. “Change” has many meanings and dimensions in the analysis of behavior, material culture, and institutions, including innovation and the addition of something new, rejection or subtraction of certain elements, adaptation and adoption, and the substitution of one element for another (Barnett 1953; Lane et al. 2009b; Spratt 1989). With regard to the changing roles of certain goods under capitalism, this process of change is called commodification or commoditization (Kopytoff 1986). Anthropological and archaeological analyses of situations of culture contact have spawned a large vocabulary that has been highly contested in the last twenty years. Old terminology of culture change includes “assimilation,” “acculturation,” “transculturation,” “syncretism” (which began with reference to religion), “mestizaje” (biological mixing), and “creolization” (language change and the Caribbean). More recently, “hybridity” (Bhabha 1992:173–183) 39

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and “hybridization” (van Dommelen 2005:117–118) have been added in the hopes of diminishing the value-laden rhetoric and exclusionary politics of some of the other terms (but cf. Stewart 1999:45), as have merger (Rodseth 2005:88) and bricolage (Werbner 1986). Other useful concepts can be drawn from theoretical approaches in sociology, including actor-networks and diffusion of innovation, as will be seen below. Actor-Network Theory: Follow the Actors! A provocative take on the role of material culture in society and societal change is the small subset of sociological theory called actor-network theory, or ant (see Latour 2005; Law 1992). Developed out of studies of science, technology, and society (sts) and focused on the intersection of innovation, patenting, and similar topics, ant is not a theory in the hypothesis-testing sense. Instead, it is an inductive “alternative social theory” about how to study and describe social collectivities (Latour 2005:142), an approach that is simultaneously “a theory of agency, a theory of knowledge, and a theory of machines” (Law 1992:6). In Bruno Latour’s thinking, ant is about “reassembling the social” and an inversion of the normative model of sociological study. That is, “the social” or “the group” is not a first-order given, an independent entity to which everything else (political, economic, legal, etc.) is related. Rather, the goal of the analysis is to understand the creation of the social—the formation of groups or networks—which is achieved only by examining and reassembling the associations among various elements of political or economic decisions and behavior. Social groups are the results or effects of these associations, not their cause. As John Law (1992:1) comments, we should not “start out assuming whatever we wish to explain.” Latour (2005) identifies five “sources of uncertainty” that must be confronted in an ant study, of which the first three are most relevant here. The first: do not start with predefined groups but rather investigate the processes of construction of social ties and controversies over the formation, performance, and collapse of groups. The second is that there is no privileged locus of action. Instead, analysts must listen to the actors themselves. In producing the social, an actor may be an active “mediator” that can “transform, translate, distort, and modify” meanings, or an inert “intermediary” that “transports meaning or force” but does not stimulate change: its inputs define its outputs (Latour 2005:39).

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The third source of uncertainty is the most salient: “objects too have agency” in the formation, dissolution, and reformation of social groups (Latour 2005:64). Here I prefer the term “artifact” to “object”: an artifact is “something that human beings produce for the use of (generally other) human beings . . . [and may be] physical, informational or performative” (Lane et al. 2009a:26). Wine, for example, is an artifact. The idea that objects or artifacts have agency does not mean that they exercise intentionality, nor is it a statement of technological determinism. Rather, agency is conferred by humans: informational artifacts materialize knowledge, manifest in today’s world as printed works, computers, satellites, software, and so on (Law 1992:2). In ancient times, knowledge was embodied in objects—often exotic and exquisitely crafted—that represented status and wealth, which in turn underwrote legitimacy and social order (Baines and Yoffee 1998, 2000; Helms 1993). As actors, artifacts might allow, produce, structure, define, negotiate, authorize, encourage, influence, or prevent certain social outcomes. Artifacts can lose their status as intermediaries and become active mediators (Latour 2005:70n81, 71, 81). Thus a social world can be “understood as an entanglement of interactions” among human and nonhuman (including plant and animal) agents (Latour 2005:65). These interactions are spelled out by the “reciprocity principle: the generation of new artifact types is mediated by the transformation of relationships among agents; and new artifact types mediate the transformation of relationships among agents” (Lane et al. 2009a:28). The ant dictum “Follow the actors!” becomes a call to incorporate these nonhuman elements into the analysis of social groups or collectives, and takes ant beyond sociology and firmly into the realm of anthropology and the study of culture. The “n” in ant—“network”—is not always clear. Law (1992:2–3), agreeing that nonhuman entities have agency, argues that “networks are composed not only of people, but also of machines, animals, texts, money, architectures. . . . We wouldn’t have a society at all if it weren’t for the heterogeneity of the networks of the social. . . . almost all of our interactions with other people are mediated through objects.” Although this position may raise ethical and moral issues among philosophers and other theorists about the relations between people and objects, as an analytical or heuristic device—especially for archaeologists—it merits attention. Actor-network theory insists that “an actor is a patterned network of heterogeneous relations. . . . an actor is also, always, a network” (ibid.: 4). For the present purposes, Latour’s (2005:204) explication of ant disap-

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points in minimizing distinctions between local and global: “No place dominates enough to be global and no place is self-contained enough to be local.” From the late twentieth century onward, these distinctions truly may be obliterated. For the early modern period, however, with the rise of capitalism accompanying expeditions of exploration and settlement circling the globe, geography and the interactions between the local and the global were key elements—actors—reassembled into a new world order, the capitalist world-system. Innovations and Their Diffusion A final theoretical perspective on Moquegua’s changing role in a colonial periphery and frontier builds on this notion of agency in material culture and looks at the role of innovation. There is a vast literature on this subject, which treats everything from changes accompanying culture contact (e.g., Barnett 1953) to modern business success. The focus here is not on the process of innovation itself (see, e.g., Rossi and Russo 2009) but on the spread and adoption of innovations in artifacts. Studies of innovations (Clarke 2009; Robinson 2009) have shown that the successful ones: have a perceived performance advantage over the existing technology or good; are compatible with existing values and practices, and meet felt needs; are relatively simple to understand and integrate into existing behaviors; can be easily and safely experimented with early on; and have readily observable results as satisfactory substitutes for or improvements over the existing technology or good. All innovations carry with them a set of uncertainties, including availability of resources, organizational changes, technological challenges, and susceptibility to market forces and consumer acceptance, which must be resolved for the innovation to be successful (Leifer et al. 2000:18–23). Some of the business literature on innovations dichotomizes them as incremental/sustaining versus radical/disruptive. Incremental or sustaining innovations emphasize improvements in performance, cost, or quality, and result from an individual’s ability to identify ways to modify or expand existing products or services (Christenson 1997: xv; Leifer et al. 2000:5). Radical innovations, by contrast, represent the creation of—or use of new ideas or technologies to create—a new product or process that transforms the existing market, and results from envisioning something new and different (Leifer et al. 2000:5). These innovations may replace existing products within familiar markets, add to a suite of products, or open up an entirely new set of products and markets (ibid.: 6–7).

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Studies of how innovations are transmitted began in the early 1960s and now focus primarily on the “diffusion of innovations” (doi) in information technology and related hardware in the marketplace. doi studies emphasize social learning: the importance of peer networks and face-to-face communication in spreading information about an innovation and encouraging its success. These investigations have identified a predictable developmental trajectory or life cycle of an innovation in the marketplace marked by four phases (Christenson 1997:171–172). First is functionality: a new good or product (artifact) satisfies a need or performs a useful function. Second, when two or more artifacts compete to satisfy that need/function, customers will choose one based on its reliability and that of its vendor. Third, when two or more equally reliable vendors supply equally reliable artifacts, customers will select either on the basis of convenience. Finally, when multiple vendors offer multiple reliable and convenient artifacts, the determining factor for success is price. Studies of individuals who adopt innovations at each stage have revealed some consistencies on the basis of attitudes to change (see fig. 2.1; Robinson 2009:5–9):

2.1. Patterns of adoption of an innovation (after Robinson 2009:5). The lower, bellshaped curve shows segments of an innovation-adopting population. The upper S-curve approximates acceptance rate through time; it also charts the early stages of development of historical archaeology in the Andes since the Bodegas Project.

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• Innovators: people who are unusually visionary, imaginative, venturesome, and open to novelty; estimated at 2.5 percent of the population. • Early adopters (13.5 percent): driven by a need for prestige and a desire to be “trend-setters,” these individuals “tend to be more economically successful, well connected and well informed and hence more socially respected. . . . What early adopters say about an innovation determines its success.” • Early majority (34 percent): mainstream followers, pragmatic, and moderately risk-averse, but also open to progressive ideas about doing things cheaper, faster, or simpler. • Late majority (34 percent): very conservative, risk-averse, and skeptical individuals who favor the status quo but eventually accept new ideas to “keep up” with others. • Laggards (16 percent): individuals who are highly vested in the status quo and tradition, and are highly critical and fearful of change and departures from these norms. A small percentage of these are likely to be “persistent skeptics,” and never adopt the innovation. The long history of studies of technological change, including doi, reveal that over time this pattern of acceptance can be visualized as an S-shaped curve, characterized by slow early adoption and then rapid spread through majority acceptance (Rogers 1995). The flattening of the S-curve indicates saturation: no more adopters are likely to appear. Two general categories of models of the processes of transmission of information between individuals have been identified: the individual “environmental-learning model” and the “biased cultural transmission model.” The environmental-learning model postulates rational actors calculating “payoffs” in terms of various goals. Heavily influenced by classical economics, this has been the prevailing model of adoption in the doi literature (Henrich 2001). The biased cultural transmission model explains the diffusion of innovations and material culture change in terms of the preferences or biases that result in certain artifacts/behaviors being more readily favored or transmitted by consumers. These biases may be (Henrich 2001:997): “direct” or content-based (enhanced function), based on “social learning psychology”; prestige-based (copying behaviors of successful or prominent individuals of the innovators and early adopters); or conformity-based (a desire to conform to majority ideas and behavior). The widespread S-shaped patterns of innovation adoption over time are invariably associated with these kinds of biases and not with the environmental-learning model, indicating the enormous

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influence of social pressures in the transmission of innovations (Henrich 2001). Certain individuals among the innovators and early adopters play key roles in the adoption and spread of new technologies and goods. They are opinion leaders and change agents, typically enjoying high social status, high upward mobility, and extensive personal contacts and communication channels (Clarke 2009). More specifically, the successful diffusion of an innovation depends on these characteristics among the early adopters, although not so much among the innovators; poor, low-status individuals may innovate, but their innovations are less likely to be copied (Henrich 2001:1009–1010). In the parlance of ant, early adopters are actors with many associations or ties in a web of social networks, and they also accept (albeit unconsciously) the active role of artifacts as mediators and agents of change. In Robert Paynter’s model of cosmopolitan frontiers, they are development elites.

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3

core-state Spain, Wine, and the Birth of Empire

Castile has made Spain, and Castile has destroyed it. —john h. elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716, 1964

Frontiers of colonization experience the introduction of attributes of the intrusive society: language, customs, beliefs, cuisine, history, economy, social statuses, attitudes, administrative institutions and policies, and the material culture associated with all of these. Many of these traits and behaviors, like those of the indigenous society, are transformed and adapted in the formation of a new hybrid (or syncretic, or assimilative, creolized, etc.) culture. With respect to Spanish-colonial Peru, it is necessary to explore the complex character of both Islamic and Christian Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but it is also useful to probe back into medieval European history to understand the methods and motives of Spanish empire-building in the New World (Bishko 1956; Braudel 1981; Castro 1954; Phillips and Phillips 1991; Sánchez-Albornoz 1963). In terms of the model presented in chapter 2, this chapter looks at the history of the core-state of the level 2 world-system, and how the multicultural history of medieval Iberia affected colonial viticulture and wine-making. spac e an d place : t he i b e r i a n e nv ir o nm e nt Environmental factors of interest in a contact situation are chiefly exploitable resources and elements relating to economic productivity. The mineral resources of Peru (silver, gold, copper, tin, mercury) were the primary lure for Spanish conquest and exploitation, but the present concern is with agricultural productivity. Thus the specific matters of interest here are the ways in which the environment of the periphery differed from that of the homeland and considerations of diversity and stability, as these relate to replicating a

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3.1. The Iberian Peninsula: (top) Portugal and modern political divisions of Spain; (bottom) Spain’s rivers and important cities mentioned in the text.

familiar ambience for permanent settlement. From ecological and materialist as well as historical perspectives, similar physical environments between home and frontier tend to support maintenance of similar administrative (politicaleconomic) institutions, whereas dramatically different environments may contribute to the development of different organizational structures and technologies. The Iberian homeland was perceived by Christians and Muslims alike as a place of abundance. According to King Alfonso X, “The Learned,” writing in 1250, the peninsula was like a Paradise of God . . . Spain brings forth great crops of [wheat], delicious fruits, exquisite fishes, sweet milk. . . . The deer roam far and 47

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wide, flocks and horses cover the wide earth, there are many mules, and the land is secure and well provided with castles, it is happy with its good wines, content with its abundance of bread, rich in metals. (quoted in Crow 1985:100) Centuries later, however, this lush environment had been degraded: Spain had become a “dry, barren impoverished land: 10 per cent of its soil bare rock; 35 per cent poor and unproductive; 45 per cent moderately fertile; 10 per cent rich” (Elliott 1964:1). The Iberian Peninsula, comprising modern Spain and Portugal (fig. 3.1), is dominated by an elevated (ca. 700 m; 2,000 ft.), rolling central plateau, or meseta. Bounded by mountains on all sides, the plateau is drained by five major river systems. Precipitation occurs mainly in winter, and annual rainfall is relatively low, higher in the north (>1,000 mm) and lower in the south and especially southeast (