Tom D. Dillehay - Böcker

From AD 1550 to 1850, the Araucanian polity in southern Chile was a center of political resistance to the intruding Spanish empire. In this book, Tom D. Dillehay examines the resistance strategies of the Araucanians and how they used mound building and other sacred monuments to reorganize their political and culture life in order to unite against the Spanish. Drawing on anthropological research conducted over three decades, Dillehay focuses on the development of leadership, shamanism, ritual, and power relations. His study combines developments in social theory with the archaeological, ethnographic, and historical records. Both theoretically and empirically informed, this book is a fascinating account of the only indigenous ethnic group to successfully resist outsiders for more than three centuries and to flourish under these conditions.

Archeologists have always considered the beginnings of Andean civilization from c.13,000 to 6,000 years ago to be important in terms of the appearance of domesticated plants and animals, social differentiation, and a sedentary lifestyle, but there is more to this period than just these developments. During this period, the spread of crop production and other technologies, kinship-based labor projects, mound-building, and population aggregation formed ever-changing conditions across the Andes. From Foraging to Farming in the Andes proposes a new and more complex model for understanding the transition from hunting and gathering to cultivation. It argues that such developments evolved regionally, were fluid and uneven, and were subject to reversal. This book develops these arguments from a large body of archaeological evidence, collected over 30 years in two valleys in northern Peru, and then places the valleys in the context of recent scholarship studying similar developments around the world.

From AD 1550 to 1850, the Araucanian polity in southern Chile was a center of political resistance to the intruding Spanish empire. In this book, Tom D. Dillehay examines the resistance strategies of the Araucanians and how they used mound building and other sacred monuments to reorganize their political and culture life in order to unite against the Spanish. Drawing on anthropological research conducted over three decades, Dillehay focuses on the development of leadership, shamanism, ritual, and power relations. His study combines developments in social theory with the archaeological, ethnographic, and historical records. Both theoretically and empirically informed, this book is a fascinating account of the only indigenous ethnic group to successfully resist outsiders for more than three centuries and to flourish under these conditions.

Archeologists have always considered the beginnings of Andean civilization from c.13,000 to 6,000 years ago to be important in terms of the appearance of domesticated plants and animals, social differentiation, and a sedentary lifestyle, but there is more to this period than just these developments. During this period, the spread of crop production and other technologies, kinship-based labor projects, mound-building, and population aggregation formed ever-changing conditions across the Andes. From Foraging to Farming in the Andes proposes a new and more complex model for understanding the transition from hunting and gathering to cultivation. It argues that such developments evolved regionally, were fluid and uneven, and were subject to reversal. This book develops these arguments from a large body of archaeological evidence, collected over 30 years in two valleys in northern Peru, and then places the valleys in the context of recent scholarship studying similar developments around the world.

Huaca Prieta-one the world’s best-known, yet least understood, early maritime mound sites-and other Preceramic sites on the north coast of Peru bear witness to the beginnings of civilization in the Americas. Across more than fourteen millennia of human occupation, the coalescence of maritime, agricultural, and pastoral economies in the north coast settlements set in motion long-term biological and cultural transformations that led to increased social complexity and food production, and later the emergence of preindustrial states and urbanism. These developments make Huaca Prieta a site of global importance in world archaeology.This landmark volume presents the findings of a major archaeological investigation carried out at Huaca Prieta, the nearby mound Paredones, and several Preceramic domestic sites in the lower Chicama Valley between 2006 and 2013 by an interdisciplinary team of more than fifty international specialists. The book’s contributors report on and analyze the extensive material records from the sites, including data on the architecture and spatial patterns; floral, faunal, and lithic remains; textiles; basketry; and more. Using this rich data, they build new models of the social, economic, and ontological practices of these early peoples, who appear to have favored cooperation and living in harmony with the environment over the accumulation of power and the development of ruling elites. This discovery adds a crucial new dimension to our understanding of emergent social complexity, cosmology, and religion in the Neolithic period.

Anthropological histories and historical geographies of colonialism both have examined the material and discursive processes of colonization and have identified the opportunities for different kinds of relationships to emerge between Europeans and the indigenous people they encountered and in different ways colonized. These studies have revealed complex, differentiated, colonializing and colonialized identities, shifting and ambiguous political relations, social pluralities, and mutating and distinctive modes of colonization. This book focuses on the complementary historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence for indigenous resistance and resilience in the specific form of parlamento political negotiations or attempted treaties between the Spanish Crown and the Araucanians in south-central Chile from the late 1600s to the early 1800s.  Armed conflict, the rejection of most Spanish material culture, and the use of the indigenous Mapundungun language atparlamentos were obvious forms of Araucanian resistance. From a bigger picture, the book is based on an interdisciplinary perspective and asserts that historical archeology can provide better interpretations of past societies only if combined with other disciplines experienced by the treatment of existing data for historical periods, such as those provided by the written documents and which can be subjected to an anthropological, ethnohistorical, and linguistic reading by these disciplines. This creates tension because complementarity but also requires a questioning of the methods themselves as an offset look in order to include the other disciplinary perspectives.​

Anthropological histories and historical geographies of colonialism both have examined the material and discursive processes of colonization and have identified the opportunities for different kinds of relationships to emerge between Europeans and the indigenous people they encountered and in different ways colonized. These studies have revealed complex, differentiated, colonializing and colonialized identities, shifting and ambiguous political relations, social pluralities, and mutating and distinctive modes of colonization. This book focuses on the complementary historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence for indigenous resistance and resilience in the specific form of parlamento political negotiations or attempted treaties between the Spanish Crown and the Araucanians in south-central Chile from the late 1600s to the early 1800s.  Armed conflict, the rejection of most Spanish material culture, and the use of the indigenous Mapundungun language atparlamentos were obvious forms of Araucanian resistance. From a bigger picture, the book is based on an interdisciplinary perspective and asserts that historical archeology can provide better interpretations of past societies only if combined with other disciplines experienced by the treatment of existing data for historical periods, such as those provided by the written documents and which can be subjected to an anthropological, ethnohistorical, and linguistic reading by these disciplines. This creates tension because complementarity but also requires a questioning of the methods themselves as an offset look in order to include the other disciplinary perspectives.​

This volume provides an up-to-date and in-depth summary and analysis of the political practices of pre-Columbian communities of the Araucanians or Mapuche of south-central Chile and adjacent regions. This synthesis draws upon the empirical record documented in original research, as well as a critical examination of previous studies. By applying both archaeological and ethnohistorical approaches, the latter including ethnography, this volume distinguishes itself from many other studies that explore South American archaeology. Archaeological and traditional-historical narratives of the pre-European past are considered in their own terms and for the extent to which they can be integrated in order to provide a more rounded and realistic understanding than otherwise of the origins and courses of ecological, economic, social and political changes in south-central Chile from late pre-Hispanic times, through the contact period and up to Chile’s independence from Spain (ca. AD 1450-1810). Both the approach and the results are discussed in the light of similar situations elsewhere.Throughout its treatment, the volume continually comes back to two central questions: (1) how did the varied practices, institutions and worldviews of the Mapuche’s ancient communities emerge as a historical process that resisted the Spanish empire for more than 250 years? and (2) how were these communities reproduced and transformed in the face of ongoing culture contact and landscape change during the early Colonial period? These questions are considered in light of contemporary theoretical concepts regarding practice, landscape, environment, social organization, materiality and community that will make the book relevant for students and scholars interested in similar processes elsewhere.