INTRODUCTION

Summary

This book is about living, interactive mounds and other monuments that were built between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Araucanians, or Mapuche, of south-central Chile and that are still in ritual use today by a few indigenous communities (Fig. 1). Mounds, or kuel (cuel) in the native language, are perceived by people as living kindred who participate in public ceremony, converse with priestly shamans about the well-being and future of the community, and thus have powerful influence over people. The oldest kuel are archaeological sites associated with the rise of dynastic late pre-Hispanic patrilineages that rapidly developed into the early historic Araucanian “estado,” or polity, referenced by the first Spanish in the region. (In sixteenth-century Spanish, estado means an organized political condition and not necessarily the “state” level of society we recognize in the scholarly literature today.) This polity successfully resisted European intrusion longer than any indigenous society in American history until it was finally defeated by the Chilean army in the mid-1890s. The Araucanians were not conquered and influenced by the Spanish the way other Native American groups were. Instead, after initial sporadic contact in the latter half of the sixteenth century, they were outside of the authority of the Spanish and defeated and drove them out of their territory for nearly 300 years from the late 1500s to the late 1800s. In this process, the Araucanians established a formal military frontier and sovereign territory recognized by the Spanish Crown.