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Constructing History: the Inka and Spanish Empires through the Archaeology of the Huarochirí Manuscript (circa 1608) by Carla Hernandez (Anthropology, UC Riverside)

Dr. Carla Hernandez is Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, Riverside.

Between the 15th and 16th centuries, Andean communities experienced successive waves of colonialism, first by the Inka and then by the Spanish Empires. In both cases, many indigenous communities attempted to offset colonial rule by building bridges through legibility with their conquerors. While only some of these attempts were fruitful, these communities were able to accommodate and negotiate their identities in order to reclaim a measure of political agency through the constraints of empire. In this presentation, I build upon a large body of archaeological and historical research to question how a local community voiced their experience of colonialism and how did they incorporate this experience within their own understandings of collective history.

In this presentation, she will discuss the case of the people of Huarochirí in the Peruvian highlands. Huarochirí is the home of an outstanding colonial-period document known as the Huarochirí Manuscript. Compiled by indigenous assistants of a mestizo curate by 1608, the Manuscript was intended as a tool for the extirpation of idolatries. However, the Manuscript also embodies the unexpected consequences of colonialism, where a tool for oppression becomes a space for local agency. Through the scribe’s stated goal of telling the history of the people of Huarochirí, she will discuss her archaeological research in the region. Ultimately, she will contend that notions of community and kinship built through ritual practices enabled the people of Huarochirí to tell a different history of colonialism through which their practices and traditions could endure.