This article describes a series of steps to integrate multiple modes of archaeological mapping in arid and agricultural settings. We use the coastal region of Peru as a case study and share our recent field experience at Cerro San Isidro, a multicomponent hill site located in the agriculture-intensive and mid-elevation (about 500 m asl) Moro region of the Nepeña Valley. In June and July 2022, we spent eight weeks deploying a combination of drone aerial imagery, pedestrian GPS reconnaissance, and GPR survey to map the surface and subsurface features at the site and in the adjacent agricultural fields. Our efforts suggest that the ancient settlement extended over an area of at least 50 ha, well beyond the visible surface architecture. Using a multimodal approach to confirming the partial destruction of archaeological vestiges by modern agricultural encroachment is both time-effective and noninvasive. The article offers insights from our experience, including the sequence of field operations, technical troubleshooting, and the collection and integration of datasets. We discuss the methodological potential and implications of this combination of multimodal mapping and its deployment in coastal Peru, a region that, like many others in the world, is increasingly subject to rapid agricultural expansion and other anthropogenic developments.

A partir de las series fotográficas Padre Patria (2014–2019) y Vírgenes de la Puerta (2014–2016), de Juan José Barboza-Gubo y Andrew Mroczek, este ensayo reflexiona acerca de la identidad de las mujeres trans en el Perú desde la sexualidad, el mestizaje y la colonialidad del poder. Padre Patria ofrece una narrativa visual de los crímenes de odio hacia la comunidad LGBTI en diferentes lugares del país. En Vírgenes de la Puerta se propone un nuevo modelo de feminidad a través de la apropiación de íconos religiosos como la Virgen María. A partir de enfoques decoloniales, feministas, de diversidad sexual y biopoder, este trabajo indaga sobre la reformulación del retrato fotográfico de las mujeres trans a través de la estética mariana y la violencia patriarcal. La dimensión política de este proyecto fotográfico busca visibilizar las experiencias de las mujeres trans en la actualidad.

We previously reported astronomical alignments with the principal temple of the archaeological site of El Paraiso in coastal Peru. Here we describe a new investigation of nine small platform mounds associated with the two giant animal effigy mounds at the site. A total station map of the site permits possible astronomical alignments to be measured directly from the AutoCAD map by Pixelstick or AutoCAD. We corrected alignments for obliquity and for the apparent curvature of the sun and moon over the crest of nearby ridges. Azimuths for astronomical events were obtained from Starry Night Pro Plus 6.4.3. We found that 13 of 14 alignments were within 1° of the predicted astronomical values (and all 14 were within 1.5°). To account for these findings and those of the giant animal platform effigy mounds at the site, we propose a cosmology in the Late Preceramic period of solar and lunar alignments and the linkage of supernatural animals to dark cloud constellations. The building of these mounds was directed by astronomer priests. A shared belief in a cosmology that included a punishing force may have eased transactions by engendering trust among individuals living across river valleys and at different altitudes.

This article explores the spatial politics of Peru’s gastronomic revolution and corresponding efforts to territorialize Peruvian agricultural products by tracing the spatial dynamics of quinoa’s trajectory from highland dietary staple to coveted national food. Efforts to codify Peru’s national cuisine have involved mapping ingredients and dishes onto specific regions while dramatically reshaping agricultural production geographies and culinary topographies. Because of quinoa’s success as a high-value export crop, the Peruvian altiplano is no longer perceived as a landscape useful exclusively for livestock pasture and mining. Instead, it is imagined as agriculturally productive: the country’s quinoa heartland. At the same time, quinoa’s trajectory illuminates spatial contradictions in the gastronomic boom’s purported objectives and its tangible effects. The revalorization of quinoa led to a geographical expansion of its production outside the high Andes, undermining the spatially bound concepts of authenticity promoted by gastronomic leaders in Peru. Broadly, efforts to commercialize marginalized food products and their corresponding regions can at once reconfigure territorial discourses in important ways, reinforce long-standing geographical inequalities, and generate contestations of the geographic imaginaries of food and nation.

We examined stable isotopes (δ13C, δ15N, and δ34S) of camelid, cavid, and cervid remains from Upanca, an archaeological site located in the Southern Nasca Region on the south coast of Peru. Occupation at the site began in the Middle Archaic (around 3200–3000 BC) and continued through the Nasca period (AD 100–650). Remains predating 2500 BC show low δ13C and δ15N values, whereas remains after this time show increasing and especially more variable isotopic values. We interpret this pattern as marking both a process of agricultural intensification and camelid husbandry diversification. Agricultural intensification began first with C3 plants in fertilized fields, beginning around 2200 cal BC, followed by an increasing use of C4 plants (maize, kiwicha, or both), particularly after 800 cal BC. By the beginning of the first millennium, people were using a diverse range of strategies to raise llamas and alpacas, including feeding them wild or cultivated C3 plants, feeding them cultivated C4 plant foods, mixing C3 and C4 plant foods, foddering some in natural coastal environments, and acquiring still other camelids by hunting wild stocks (guanaco, vicuña). Data also suggest that cavids were consuming at least some C4 products after 1000 cal BC and that the use of C4 plants increased over time.

The nineteenth century was a dynamic period for hacienda workers on the south coast of Peru. Former Jesuit vineyards with two of the largest enslaved African-descended populations in rural coastal Peru—the haciendas of San Joseph (San José) and San Francisco Xavier (San Javier)—and their annexes in Nasca's Ingenio Valley underwent dramatic transformations with the replacement of their grapevines with cotton and the introduction of new types of workers. Cantonese indentured workers were contracted beginning in the 1830s, and the majority-enslaved workforce was legally emancipated in 1854. Seasonally, highland Andean workers joined the demographically shifting permanent hacienda population. We use evidence from excavated midden contexts at San Joseph, San Xavier, and San Joseph's annex of Hacienda La Ventilla to explore these changing agroindustrial dynamics and worker well-being in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Despite the transformations at the estates, we find that culinary practices developed by enslaved Africans and their descendants during the Jesuit administration, such as the preparation of one-pot meals and stews, continued into the republican era among Cantonese indentured laborers and wage workers of Indigenous, mestizo, and Cantonese origins. We argue that such strategies centered on foodways were a crucial aspect of worker self-care regimes and broader well-being.

Este ensayo discute el arte de Brus Rubio, artista amazónico huitoto-murui, quien en sus trabajos informa cómo su cultura entiende su historia, incluidos sus momentos de explotación, tradiciones, creencias y presente. Para ilustrar las diferencias entre sus obras y el discurso de la Amazonía más común en el pasado, incluyo, también, una discusión sobre la manera en que se caracterizaba a las poblaciones indígenas en la zona a principios del siglo XX —en torno, principalmente, al debate de los crímenes del Putumayo. En Rubio se evidencia un choque entre “historias oficiales” —saberes verticales que explican una realidad sin ser parte de ella ni aceptarla como interlocutora válida— y la de la comunidad —reflejado en estas obras como un saber horizontal, en que se incluye las voces que suelen no ser escuchadas. Así, la obra de Rubio presenta un nuevo modelo para entender la historia y el presente de la Amazonía.

From the moment it launched its armed insurgency in 1980 until the death of its former leader in September 2021, Peru’s Shining Path mesmerized observers. The Maoist group had a well-established reputation as a personality cult whose members were fanatically devoted to Abimael Guzmán, the messianic leader they revered as “Presidente Gonzalo.” According to this narrative, referred to here as the “Gonzalo mystique,” Shining Path zealots were prepared to submit to Guzmán’s authority and will—no matter how violent or suicidal—because they viewed him as a messiah-prophet who would usher in a new era of communist utopia. Drawing on newly available sources, including the minutes of Shining Path’s 1988–1989 congress, this article complicates the Gonzalo mystique narrative, tracing the unrelenting efforts by middle- and high-ranking militants to challenge, undermine, disobey, and even unseat Guzmán throughout the insurgency. Far from seeing their leader as the undisputed cosmocrat of the popular imagination, these militants recognized Guzmán for who he was: a deeply flawed man with errant ideas, including a dubious interpretation of Maoism, problematic military strategy, and a revolutionary path that was anything but shining.

This article explores how sex and violence were part of the everyday making of the soldier in the Peruvian armed forces during the internal armed conflict between 1980 and 2000. In-depth interviews with Peruvian veterans indicate the importance of sex and violence in soldiers’ experience of becoming a combatant. The article analyzes the ambiguity in soldiers’ narratives about sex and violence, coercion, and consent, and how they are implicated in both receiving and enacting sexualized violence. In particular, authors discuss veterans’ accounts of collective experiences of sexualized hazing, abuse of women and girls, porn and prostitution, and references to gang rape. Soldiers, while in the army, experience intimacy through performative practices of sex and violence—which profoundly affect their interactions with one another—and the violence they perpetrate against enemy populations. These military intimacies, encouraged through institutional as well as cultural practices, help explain the prevalence of widespread sexual violence during the conflict.

Social conflicts stemming from industrial mining projects in Peru have increasingly been fought in court cases in recent years. This article analyzes the dark side of this judicialization of mining conflicts, a process through which state authorities criminalize participation in social protests and attempt to prevent the mobilization of social movements. This use of the law by public authorities is an example of the so-called shrinking space in which the scope of action of civil society actors is increasingly restricted and constrained worldwide. This article presents an in-depth analysis of a specific court case against a group of mining opponents in the Cajamarca region of Peru. Based on ethnographic field research conducted in Peru, the article discusses three different modalities of the law’s domination, exploring the various ways the law rules those who oppose large-scale extractive projects.

Conflict has become a central concept to understanding the recent expansion of mining across the Andes. Yet, while contestation can emerge and has done so, the continued extraction of minerals requires scholars to attend to how mining projects maintain viability. This article moves beyond analyses of conflict to elucidate the role of compromise in achieving temporary states of homeostasis. Using ethnographic data collected at the Las Bambas copper mine in the highlands of southern Peru, I explore the agential navigation of communities affected by mining and the projects they develop in pursuit of ‘a better life’. The article elucidates the challenges that industrial production presents for professional employment, the limitations of boomtown hustling (informal economic activity) for aspiring individuals, and the rise of artisanal mining as a project of social mobility. Ultimately, the acceptance of such ‘illegal’ mining by corporate proprietors demonstrates the complementary nature that informal and formal extraction play in allaying the momentum of conflict.

Economic directness is a new model of socioeconomic organization for the Paracas culture (800–200 BC) in southern Peru, with wider implications for economic theory of the prehispanic Andean past. Using an archaeoeconomic approach to analyze settlement patterns, obsidian artifacts, malacological material, and camelid skeletal remains, this study reconstructs the Paracas economy by using primary archaeological data from the northern Nasca Drainage. Its results force reconsideration of existing socioeconomic models for the ancient Andes such as verticality, circuit mobility, llama caravan mobility, transhumance, and market concepts. Whereas components typical of these models are often absent in the case of the Paracas economy, our new proposal of economic directness integrates their relevant aspects. Economic directness is defined essentially by direct access to important resources from diverse ecological tiers, direct and down-the-line exchanges, reduced transaction costs, llama caravan transport, unbalanced commodity flows across the western Andes, and forces of supply and demand with major consumption on the coast. These features formed under conditions of population growth, generating a continuous and dense settlement pattern from the Pacific coast to the highland puna zone.

Children and childhood have emerged as important topics for understanding the history of African slavery in the Americas. In historical archaeology, analyses of subadult skeletal remains have provided valuable information about the biological and social conditions of captivity, yet children are infrequently the primary subjects of study in African diaspora bioarchaeology. Recent bioarchaeological research at Hacienda La Quebrada, a late colonial sugar plantation in central Peru, brings new data to bear on these subjects. Excavations at the cemetery for the plantation's enslaved African and Afro-descendant population recovered 158 subadults ranging from newborns to 20 years old, who represented 64% of the burial sample. Paleodemographic data and skeletal indicators of stress indicate that enslaved children were disproportionately affected by the conditions of life at Hacienda La Quebrada, particularly because of insufficient diets and susceptibility to infection and disease. Although these results are specific to the context of plantation slavery in Peru's coastal sugar economy, they contribute new information about the history of African slavery in Peru and about the study of childhood in conditions of captivity and colonialism in the Spanish Americas more broadly.

When and why do legislatures impeach presidents? We analyse six cases of attempted impeachment in Paraguay, Brazil and Peru to argue that intra-coalitional politics is central to impeachment outcomes. Presidents in Latin America often govern with multiparty, ideologically heterogeneous coalitions sustained by tenuous pacts. Coalitions are tested when crises, scandals or mass protests emerge, but presidents can withstand these threats if they tend to allies’ interests and maintain coalitions intact. Conversely, in the absence of major threats, presidents can be impeached if they fail to serve partners’ interests, inducing allies to support impeachment as acts of opportunism or self-preservation.

The reform approved in Peru in 2009 during a right-wing government deviates from similar attempts in the region to expand access to healthcare. Left-wing parties in Peru were extremely weak during the policy-making process and the political parties were non-programmatic. Based on original field research, this article demonstrates how parties that lacked core values uniting their leaders and had no commitment to the health reform did not care for the definition of specifications regarding funding and implementation. Instead, technocrats dominated the process of policy formation, which, accompanied by the lack of commitment from key political actors, led to poorly specified policy and deficient implementation.

Investigations at the site of Huacas de Moche—also referred to as Huacas del Sol and de la Luna—on the north coast of Peru show a continuous occupational sequence from around AD 100 to 1500. The longest occupation corresponds to the Moche culture from around AD 100 to 850. Based on available archaeological evidence, this article examines the impact of an El Niño-like event in AD 600 on the history of Huacas de Moche. Widely held hypotheses assumed that this kind of climatic event caused the abandonment of the site; however, such explanations do not fit the current data. After almost three decades of research, archaeological evidence indicates that after the El Niño-like phenomenon of AD 600, the Old Temple of Huaca de la Luna was closed down, and the New Temple was built toward the east of the previous one, on the same slope of Cerro Blanco. Furthermore, on the opposite side of the site, the building called Huaca del Sol experienced its last and greatest architectural expansion, becoming a large-scale palace. These new lines of evidence lead us to reassess the effect that the El Niño-like phenomenon of AD 600 had on the development of the Moche culture at the site.

The addition of drones to the archaeologist's toolbox has brought about exciting new possibilities, particularly for field research and the conservation and protection of our built heritage. As drones become more widely available and effective, the challenge of precision becomes more important. Better georeferencing and higher-resolution outputs are the current thresholds. In order to achieve the second objective with our current equipment, drones have to fly closer to the ground and, ideally, follow the elevation of the surface. This task can be extremely complicated along the steep surfaces and mountains typical to the Andean region where we work. In this article, we present a recording (flying and photographing) methodology that achieves a higher ground resolution by dividing up the sites into several altitudinal sections, which are flown independently yet processed photogrammetrically as a single set. We have named this methodology “Flying Slopes in Multiple Stepped Polygons.”

In 1936, the indigenous Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi travelled to and exhibited his work in Chile. Using a transnational framework of historical analysis, this article explores the multiple meanings of his visit. In particular it underscores the involvement of the Chilean and Peruvian governments in this cultural encounter, and highlights some of the commonalities and connections, as well as differences, between the discourses of race that were circulating in Chile and Peru at the time. This is important because it undermines the dominant historical narratives, which have tended to present Chile as a country that – in contrast to Peru – failed to engage in discussions about the so-called ‘indigenous question’, and which have interpreted relations between Chile and Peru almost exclusively as antagonistic and hostile.

This article discusses the available sources of information on the value and volume of Peru’s exports and estimates the current value of exports, the index of export prices and the quantum of exports using a wide variety of sources. By relying on several sources, I estimate the first complete series of the current value of exports for Peru for 1830-1930. Importantly, I adjust other studies’ estimates by taking into account the deficiencies of foreign sources and by distinguishing between exports of specie and of minerals. The estimations show that exports experienced substantial growth in the 1850s and 1860s, during the Guano Era. Exports stagnated in the 1870s and dropped during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) before recovering in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially during World War I.