The University of Arizona Press
April 2, 2026
Within just two generations, communities in the Peruvian Andes experienced conquest by the Indigenous Inka Empire (1450–1532 CE) and the European Spanish (1532–1821 CE), leading to three centuries of colonial subjugation. Reinvention and History Making in Huarochirí: A Local Narrative of Colonialism in the Peruvian Andes by Carla Hernández Garavito is an archaeological and historical rendering of the experience of the people of Huarochirí (Lima, Peru) and their interactions with successive waves of colonialism. This exciting new work moves the field of Andean archaeology into conversations with decolonial and decolonizing methodologies and shows how Indigenous communities captured and made sense of their long history, reframing colonialism as a local experience.
Using archaeological and historical datasets and spatial modeling, this book centers on local memory and experience throughout colonized landscapes as the thread that connects the long history of Indigenous engagement with expanding colonial empires and the emergent Peruvian nation. The author builds on Andean epistemological frameworks to argue that in the face of drastic sociopolitical changes, the people of Huarochirí turned to their own history. They created analogies and shared spaces between local and Inka landscapes and materiality and incorporated written representations and ideas of settled lives to validate their claims. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.
The investigation of colonialism in archaeology has deep roots, and much has been written about its engagement with world-systems theory and postcolonial approaches (Gosden 2004; Stein 2005) and its more modern engagement with issues of hybridity (Dean and Leibsohn 2003; Silliman 2015), syncretism (Nutini 1976), negotiation (Wernke 2013), and resistance (González-Ruibal 2014; Liebmann and Murphy 2011). Learning about the exciting ways in which anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians engaged with colonialism, however, was a stark contrast to the archaeology I had first learned and in the way in which I had integrated the Spanish invasion of the Americas and my own country in the sixteenth century.
The monumental materiality of the Inka Empire and the detailed descriptions left by the Spanish colonizers that met or heard firsthand of the Inka inspired the early development of the archaeology of Cusco, the Inka capital, and eventually other significant provincial centers throughout the Peruvian Andes. It was through this archaeological work that the empire came to be understood in a more diverse and less paternalistic view, with an emphasis on negotiation with local leaders and detailed analyses of the selective transformations in each different region during the Inka period (Earle 1987; Morris et al. 2011; Murra 1980). This body of research, rich in details and empirical data, still favored an emphasis on investigating the changes brought about by the empire; the history of different Andean communities was tied to what happened when they met the Inka and processes of alliance, incorporation, or coercion.
At the same time, besides some initial explorations—particularly those carried out in Lima by the Seminario de Arqueología de la PUCP (Arrieta Introduction 7 1974; Cárdenas 1970, 1971; Vargas Correa 2016)—the Spanish invasion and colonial era were not a substantial part of archaeological inquiry until the twenty-first century. To that point, as an undergraduate student in the early 2000s, I took a series of classes on Peruvian archaeology (levels 1 to 6, covering six semesters), ending with the Inka Empire. Spanish colonialism remained in the realm of historians. While this has changed, it was only in the past 20 years that the archaeology of the colonial Andes has experienced sustained scholarly focus. This break, however, is not only an imaginary boundary but also a useless one, as these communities’ material culture and written words jointly constitute critical domains of their lives and histories. Moreover, the investigation of colonialism itself was also tied to the Spanish invasion. The Inka period, somewhat hidden under the designation of “empire,” seemed to not fully engage with the same complex issues of identity, resistance, and diversity that were implied in European colonial processes.
Carla Hernández Garavito is a Peruvian archaeologist and an assistant professor in the anthropology department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research centers on the study of colonialism in the Peruvian Andes. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Latin American Antiquity, the Journal of Social Archaeology, and Ethnohistory. The National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, among others, have funded her research.
