Tambos and the Andean Longue Durée: Landscapes of Mobility in Far Southern Peru

Abstract

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