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Forgotten TerritorialitiesThe Materiality of Indigenous Pasts

Gustavo Verdesio

The research produced on colonial

Latin America in the last two decades by scholars trained in language andliterature departments shows dramatic differences in comparison to whatwas previously produced in the eld. Since the early 1980s, these scholarshave been building, slowly but effectively, a corpus of works that shows ahigher degree of awareness of the complexity of colonial situations. 1 Thesechanges were acknowledged by Rolena Adorno in a 1988 article, where shedescribes what she rst calls a paradigm shift cambio de paradigma (11)and later an emergence of certain new practices and priorities aparicin

de ciertas prioridades y prcticas nuevas(12). That shift consists mainly of twotheoretical moves: rst, a change of focus from literature to discourse; sec-ond, a growing concern for the problematic of the Other (11). This meansthat practitioners in the eld of colonial Latin American literature stoppedworrying about the celebration of the literary value of texts and focused,instead, on the diversity of discourses that characterize a colonial situation(14). Such a shift of focus is related to the theoretical move proposed byWalter Mignolo (e.g., 1992, 810; 1991), that consists of distinguishing be-

tween a canon and a corpus-oriented research. For Mignolo (1989a), a studyof the totality of texts (be they written in European alphabetic systems ornot) produced under colonial situations is mandatory if one wants to ac-count for, and understand properly, a colonial situation. In his opinion,one should talk about colonial semiosis (the totality of symbolic messagesand exchanges in colonial situations) instead of colonial discoursean ex-pression that limits the corpus to verbal messages, whether oral or written.One of the consequences of the move he proposed was the incorporation

N e p a n t l a : Vi e w s f r o m S o u t h 2.1

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of maps, amoxtllis, kipus, and other objects that served as material supportfor symbolic messages, into the research agenda of colonial Latin Americanstudies produced by members of language and literature departments (seeMignolo 1989b and 1992, among many others).

The incorporation of nondiscursive sign systems, in addition tothe emergence of a series of studies focusing on authors of indigenousdescentsuch as Guaman Poma, Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui, and TituCusi Yupanqui from the Andean region, as well as the publication of Fer-nando Alva Ixtlilxochitls work and a reassessment of the Popol Vuh andthe Relaciones geogrcas, from Mesoamericaand the appearance of newstudies on women writersbesides the already canonical Sor Juana Insde la Cruzare symptoms of the so-called paradigm shift in colonial LatinAmerican studies. According to both Adorno (1988) and Mignolo (1992),all this results in a new situation in the eld characterized by the incorpo-ration of the indigenous, female, and other non-European/nonpatriarchalperspectives to the scholarship produced within the boundaries of the dis-cipline. All this progress toward a less colonized view of colonial times isundeniable. However, it is my contention that there is still a lot of work todo, if ones goal is to produce a more complete picture of colonial semiosis.

One of the issues that needs attention is the dearth of studies oncolonial situations in territories occupied by Amerindians who did notorganize their societies around a state. Most works published in the areahave as their object the texts produced about (and sometimes, althoughless frequently, by) the indigenous cultures usually considered the mostdeveloped:theInca,theMaya,andtheMexicaorAztec.Asaconsequence,the geographicareas favoredbya highpercentage of the researchin the eldof Latin American colonial studies are Mesoamerica and the Andes. Othergeographic areas and peoples are thus, more often than not, neglected. Thevast majority of scholars trained in language and literature departments donot pay much attention to the existence of, for example, Guarani culturedespite the fact that it covered an enormous expanse of land and that itsmembers outnumbered most of the other Amerindian populations. Thecase of other cultures that did not organize themselves around a state (forexample, hunter-gatherers) is even worse:almostnobodyin theeld studiesthem. 2

To make matters worse, extinct prehistoric cultures receive verylittle attentionfrom scholars in thediscipline. 3 We could speculateendlesslyabout the possible reasons for this neglect. However, one possible cause isthe ethnocentric prejudice of scholars when they choose their object of


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study. Practitioners of the discipline may prefer to study the great civiliza-tions of the continent because our ideological framework is determinedby a teleological and evolutionary criterion. To put it another way, whatmay make the three great cultures so attractive to us, Western scholars, istheir high level of social development in the framework of the Occidentalepisteme. Our way of understanding history as a teleological progression,as an evolution toward a certain goal or ideal, makes the Inca, Aztec, andMaya cultures look much closer than the others to the evolutionary idealthat predominates in our Western societies: they had a state, good adminis-trative organization, armies, division of labor, and so forth. In other words,those cultures resembled what we consider (consciously or not) the highestdegree of evolution possible. That highest degree of evolution coincides,of course, with the one reached by Occidental culture. Other indigenouscultures, ignored by our discipline, were more difcult to compare, in evo-lutionary terms, to the stages of organization reached by Western culture.Their incommensurability in relation to our cognitive framework mightwell be, as I suggested above, one of the causes for the scant interest theyhave inspired among scholars in the eld of Latin American colonial stud-ies. However, if our goal is to account for the colonial clash in its entirety,we must pay more attention to those cultures.

As I mentioned above, we do not know enough about what hap-pened in the territory dominated by the Inca, Maya, and Mexica before thedevelopment of these three cultures or about these cultures themselves, dueto the frequent generalizations we make about them, thus downplayingthe dramatic differences between the diverse regions and subregions thatformed their vast territories. 4 Moreover, still another blind spot in our re-search agendas affects the knowledge produced about even the best-knownpre-Columbian cultures: an almost blind faith in the truth-value of colonialtexts supplemented by a lack of interest in material culture. One of the waysto avoid some of the traps of such a faith in the text is to study the ways inwhich European subjects constructed America beyond the discursive level.

With all due respect to contributions such as EdmundoOGormans (1958), which focus on the discursive invention of the landsand peoples of the Americas, I believe we need to pay more attention tothe other ways in which that invention took place. In order to understand

that invention, it is necessary to represent it as a long process that includedacts of actual territorial appropriation. That is why I think it is necessaryto focus not only on the intellectual operations that granted being (43) tothat unknown (from a European perspective) lump of land, but also on the


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other actions the Occidental subject performed in American lands. Thoseactions had very concrete effects over the territory, the fauna, the ora, andthe human beings that populated the Americas. Those actions are proof that the Spaniards and other Europeans who arrived in America did notlimit themselves to rethinking the landscape, but that they also set out tomodify, through specic actions, the nature they encountered.

Confronted with an unknown nature, European subjects chose tomodify it, as Antonello Gerbi (1992, 337) points out. They decided to do sobecause the Indians they encountered had not achieved, from a Europeanperspective, a total control of nature; on the contrary, from the Occidentalvantage point, the Amerindians were at the mercy of nature (Gerbi 1993,1011). Instead of doing what civilized man doesdominate natureAmerindians were viewed as dominated bynatural forces. This is a particu-larly serious aw from an Occidental point of view, according to FrederickTurner (1994, xxv), due to the tendency of Western subjects to view natureas a commodity, as something that is there to be used by human beings.

In America, it was from the cities that European subjects orga-nized the conquest of the land. This operation entailed, as we will see, amodication of aboriginal nature. In the Ro de la Plata region, the names of these cities are Santa F, Buenos Aires, and later (much later) Montevideo:from these urban centers European civilization expanded to the rest of theregion, thus modifying the landscape forever. These cities were located onthe border that separated the walled structure characteristic of Europeancities from the natural open spaces of the countryside. The pampas thatsurrounded these cities were an obstacle for the expansion of Western civ-ilizational patterns around the Ro de la Plata, but, unfavorable conditionsnotwithstanding, some of these urban settlements started to grow in thesecond half of the sixteenth century; from these sites, slowly but relentlessly,European civilization began to produce changes in the region.

One key element for the expansion of European civilization wasthe introduction of bovine cattle. In particular, the introduction of cattle inone of the regions I propose tostudy, the northernshore of the Ro delaPlata(the territoryof modern-day Uruguay), strongly inuenced the forms sociallife would take on those lands. Bovine and equine cattle were introducedto that territory at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The animals

reproduced immediately, reaching numbers in the six digits, according tosome testimonies, like Flix de Azaras (1969). 5 These animals became therst European occupants of the region because it was considered at thattime as tierras de ningn provechounprotable landsthat is, lands not


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good enough to justify the existence of a Spanish settlement. As a conse-quence of their rapid reproduction, the material foundation for pastorallife started to develop: killing cows and riding horses would be the mostcommon means of subsistence for the Europeans who would later settle inthe region. Numerous testimonies by travelers concur in their appreciationof both the cattle wealth available and the fertility of the land. For three cen-turies, travelers marveled at the abundance they saw and, above all, at theculture of waste that abundance engendered among the criollos and otherlocals (including gauchos andAmerindians). 6 What those observers did notmention (probably because they were not aware of it) were the ecologicalchanges that were taking place before their eyes. The fact is that whenCharles Darwin visited the region in the 1830s, the multitudes of cattle hadproduced serious modications to the areas biota. Their grazing and theirfeces started a process of modication of the ora and the soil, as Darwin(1989, 119) noticed. Yet cattle and human beings were not the only agents of biological change: some species of trees from the Old Worldsuch as theorange and the peachwere also responsible for ecological changes (Azara1969, 81, 98).

Today, Uruguayan lands are seen as a cattle paradise, as a com-munity of (white) European settlers, or as a New Europe, dependingon the authors. 7 This way of representing the territory, although based onveriable elements, fails (or forgets) to account for the historical momentthat was the beginning of social life and the changes inicted on nature, aswe know both today. It was the modication of nature that paved the waynot only for the emergence of a nation-state, but also for the destruction of all possible alternative forms of social life in the territory. As a consequence,some animals and plants disappeared, and others changed their habitator their behavior. 8 Although the ecological disturbance was dramatic andsome of its effects were denitive, I dont want to give the impression thatI am attempting here to explain the changes in the landscape in purelyecological terms.

Although there is some truth to Alfred Crosbys (1996, 7) assertionabout theecological componentofEuropean imperialisms success, I believeone has to be cautious about embracing models that explain the success of an ecological invasion by recourse to an alleged superiority of the European

biota over its American counterpart. This is, in nuce, the thesis elaboratedby Crosby in his two seminal books. In his opinion, the European biota hadachieved a certain degree of biological complexity during the Neolithic era,as a consequence of thedevelopment of agriculture andthedomestication of


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animals. Because the corresponding period occurred later in the Americas,the complexity of the biota European conquistadores encountered in thenew lands was lower than the one they brought with them (1820). InCrosbys model, some diseases (unknown to Amerindians) helped makeway for European invaders; killer microorganisms helped decimate eventhe most densely populated Amerindian settlements (195216).

However, the reproduction and success of old-world species(plants, animals, diseases, andhuman beings) do notexplain, by themselves,the radical modication of the American environment. It is impossible tounderstand that process without taking into account the political and eco-nomic situation in Europe that made the expansion of Western culturepossible (Cronon 1995, 165). For example, William Cronon believes thatto talk about ecological factors, like the opportunistic microorganisms thatinvaded a biota not prepared for their arrival, in isolation, is to forget therelevance of economic ones: it was both the economic and technologicaltransformations taking place in Europe that allowed the continent to sendits people to populate the rest of the world (16162). In the case of the north-ern shore of the Ro de la Plata, the changes suffered by the ecosystem werea consequence of the European settlers need to cultivate crops and raisecattle. That is, the changes in the land were a consequence of the need toproduce commodities marketable in the context of a global market domi-nated by Europe. That is why it is fair to say that Hernandarias (governorof the region at the beginning of the seventeenth century) had a politicalas well as an economic motivation when he decided to populate the regionand to introduce cattle in it. The territory of the modern-day nation-stateof Uruguaya territory conceived by its inhabitants as something natural,somethinggiven; assomethingthat wasalwaysalready thereis thus a con-sequence of the ecological changes produced by the economic exploitationof the land started by Hernandarias.

The modication of the environment that started in the seven-teenth century is largely ignored by present-day inhabitants of the northernshore of the Ro de la Plata and by those who produce knowledge aboutit. What I propose is, then, to view the current situation of that territoryagainst the background of the actions that transformed it into what is today.In other words, I propose to understand the symbolic representations of

that territory from a diachronic perspective. In this way, the observer willbe able to study current representations of the land against the backgroundof the foundational destruction that was the condition of possibility of itscurrent shape and development.


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The image of the Americas we can get from studying European appropri-ations (be they discursive, ideological, or material) of those lands is ratherincomplete if the objective pursued is the study of a colonial situation inwhich territorial representations and practices were not exclusively Euro-pean. Amerindians of diverse ethnic origins also conceptualized and prac-ticed the space they inhabited. That is why some scholars have undertakenthe study of indigenous territorial lorea knowledge that was contempo-rary, but very different, from the one produced by European cartographicand territorial practices. Louis de Vorsey (1992) has studied the presence of indigenous cultural traces in European colonial maps in order to rescue (atleastpartially) theAmerindians spatialconceptualizations. WalterMignoloand Barbara Mundy have studied the case of the Relaciones geogrcas, thereports requested by the Spanish Crown from the local authorities aboutthe site where the settlement was located. These relaciones included the re-sponses of the Crowns ofcials in America to several questions (from ftyto two hundred) and a pintura (a picture, a drawing) of the area, generallydrawn by an indio viejo (an old Indian). 9 The pintura is not, then, a geo-graphic, but a chorographic representation of the territory. Chorography isthe knowledge of the particularities of a territory, as opposed to geography,which is the general representation of the lands without attention to topo-graphic details. For a more detailed description of chorography, considerthe following passage by sixteenth-century cosmographer Alonso de SantaCruz (1983, 203):

Geography is a demonstration of the totality of the knownEarth, with the inclusion of the most principal parts that itdepends on; it differs from chorography in that the latter, bydescribing all the places in detail, manifests each of those placesin particular and all they contain. It describes the smallest partsfound in those places, like their harbors, villages, rivers, andsimilar things; . . . the goal of chorography is to represent, suc-cessively, a part of a whole, as if the effort were to paint or toresemble an eye or an ear, whereas geography pays attention tothe whole, respecting its proportions, as if its goal were to paintthe whole head. (My translation)

This tendency to represent the particular, without relating it tothe totalityor with little interest in the global pictureis, according toWilliam Boelhower (1987, 5051), a very important distinction that allows


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us to understand the colonial encounter, because the Amerindians, whohad a chorographic notion of space, were invisible to the European gaze,which was dominated by a geographic conception. The uniform space cre-ated by geography, that articial construct, rendered the indigenous localspaces insignicant (51). However, in the Relaciones geogrcas, the Euro-pean subject depended on the chorographic knowledge of the indios viejosto learn about the topography of a specic place. This, according to Boel-hower, was due to the fact that the Amerindian had the eye as a mea-sure, which is tantamount to saying that he or she was not lost without acompass (53).

Mignolos and Mundys work on the Relaciones geogrcas andLouis de Vorseys research on the presence of traces of indigenous territo-rial knowledge in European maps are very important steps toward a morebalanced study of colonial semiosis. In one of his articles, Mignolo (1989b,97) proposes an interpretive apparatus that should depend neither on justone cultural tradition (the Occidental one) nor on a single locus of enun-ciation, but should acknowledge the existence of more than one culturaltradition. The hermeneutic tradition predominant in the West tends tosuppress other traditions to which the knowing subject does not belong(98). What Mignolo proposes, then, is a comparative study of human inter-action in colonial situations (9394). For this reason, Mignolo argues thatwe, practitioners of colonial studies, need to construct an interpretive sys-temthat entails a comparative understanding of semiotic interactionsacrossculturalboundaries; insum,whatheproposes is to rethink the way inwhichwe understand (97). In order to achieve such an interpretive system, andto account for the indigenous side of colonial semiosis, he has undertakenresearch projects that include the study of graphic indigenous territorialrepresentations produced before the colonial encounter (see Mignolo 1989band 1993, among others).

The importance of his efforts is undeniable, and they contributeto the construction of the new hermeneutics he proposes. Having said that,I believe that the study of indigenous territorial representations drawn ondiverse surfaces does not have to be the dead end of a research agenda thatattempts to compare Europeanmapswith indigenous, alternative territorialrepresentations. In my opinion, the study of hard copiesthat is, of terri-

torial representations on durable surfacesmay still be a research agendastrongly inuenced by ideological biases originating in a literate, Europeanepisteme. This operation consists in opposing a drawing on a durable sur-face (a map) to an equivalent object of indigenous originany form of


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indigenous territorial representation, like the amoxtllis of Mesoamerica.This comparison of two different conceptualizations of space during thecolonial encounter is, in my opinion, strongly conditioned by the Europeanmodel of territorial representation, which leads Mignolo to undertake thestudy of an indigenous object that resembles Occidental maps.

WhatI mean is that wedo not needto limit ouragenda to thestudyof the indigenous presence in European maps and to aboriginal represen-tations on durable surfaces in order to recover the Amerindians spatialconceptualizations. According to Denis Wood (1992, 32), all human beingshave the capacity to conceive of their relation to the space that surroundsthem through the production of mental maps. 10 Some cultures make ma-terial maps, and others do not. As Wood states, to possess knowledge aboutthe territory is very different from transmitting that knowledge to others(34). It is not unusual to nd cases of Amerindians who do not custom-arily produce territorial representations on durable surfaces and yet who,at Europeans request, are able to draw them. It is appropriate, then, todistinguish between mapmaking and mapping , the mental representationof spacebetween cultures that make maps and cultures that do not feelthe need to produce them. If we accept this distinction, it is very difcultto limit our study to the mapmaking cultures and deny the existence of spatial conceptualizations by the cultures that have not produced that kindof object.

Elsewhere, I have proposed two possible ways to partially retrievethe spatial conceptualizations and practices of the indigenous peoples (of so-called historical time) who did not produce maps: the study of the infor-mation provided by colonial chronicles and the scrutiny of the most recentarchaeological evidence (Verdesio 1997). In this way, it will be possible tosee to what extent the continent that European cartography represents asa blank page was already inscribed by the Amerindians spatial practices;that is, it will be possible to detect the traces left by the Indians on the land,their itineraries, and so forth. The goal is, then, to restore some material-ity to those peoples who were, literally, erased from the mapand fromthe history written by Western civilization. The study of the material as-pects of aboriginal spatiality could very well be a tool to recover indigenoushistorical agency.

As we have already seen, the studies on the representation of theterritory in colonial times by Mignolo and Mundy analyze maps and otherterritorial representations as symbolic systems that tell us something about


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the worldview of their authors from both sides of the colonial clash. How-ever, studies of the land itself are scarce. The materiality of the actualpossession of the territory, of the exploitation of the land, needs to be ex-plored further, among other reasons because the material aspects of culturecan be as meaningful as symbolic systems are. Material culture, then, cantell us a lot about the worldview of the culture that produced it. It cantell us, also, something about indigenous knowledges that are not recordedon sign carriers such as maps, pictographic writings, or kipus. Moreover,that material culture is the only extant document of those prehistoric andhistoric Amerindians who did not produce sign carriers of any kind.

In his monumental Darker Side of the Renaissance, Mignolo (1995a)proposes to study the materiality of sign carriers in colonial situations. Con-sequently, he embarks on a comparative study of European books and theirindigenous correlate: the Mesoamerican amoxtllis (69122). This kind of analysisallowshimtooffervaluableinsightsonmanyissues.Whenhelimitshis study to two kinds of objects that seem to have an analogous (albeit notidentical) function in two different cultures, the materiality he deals with,then, is one that allows him to compare indigenous artifacts to Europeanonesa comparison that is possible only because there is an indigenouscorrelate for the Western book. However, that kind of comparison is notpossible in all cases, because not all indigenous cultures produced recordsthat resembled Western sign carriers. The absence of such an artifact in agiven indigenous culture would prevent scholars from including that cul-ture in a comparative study. Thus, the materiality studied by Mignolo is,paradoxically, what prevents himfrom studyingcultures that lackedcertainkinds of objects, such as sign carriers.

The notion of materiality I am interested in is broader and in-cludes, besides sign carriers, all kinds of objects. For a research project thatseeks to account for the worldview, social organizations, and everyday lifeof indigenous peoples who did not produce sign carriers, archaeology canbe a helpful tool. I am particularly interested in the interpretation of objectsunderstood as relics or vestiges of human activitiesthat is, as testimonyof the actions that produced them. In this respect, archaeological methodsare attractive because they propose a study of objects that does not viewthem only qua objects, but rather as the nal product of a human activ-

ity. Of course, archaeology is not a science exempt from subjectivities: theepistemological and ideological problems that affect it aremultiple. Despitethese problems, there is one thing archaeology can do for colonial LatinAmerican literary and cultural studies scholars: put us in contact with the


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actual objects, with the material aspects of a culture that we usually studyonly through its textual production.

Such an awareness of materiality can help us, in more than oneway, to avoid interpretive mistakes. For instance, it may remind investiga-tors of indigenous cultures that even the most homogenizing of them, likethe Incas, hosted in their territories a vast array of ethnic groups that leftinnumerable testimoniesincluding pottery and architecturethat dis-tinguish them from the dominant culture. In this regard, a study of thematerial culture of, say, the Huarochiri or the Huamanga regions of theAndes could help supplement the valuable research produced on those ter-ritories and peoples by ethnohistorians such as Karen Spalding and SteveStern. It can also give additional support to research projects such as SabineMacCormacks impressive Religion in the Andes(1991), a book that shows,among other things, the religious diversity of the Andean world and thedifferent ways in which the various groups negotiated power and religiousbelief. Archaeological methods can also help recover indigenous thought.For instance, they can clarify the ways in which religious power and po-litical control worked or were understood in pre-Columbian states or insocieties without states. For example, if we believe only what the chroniclesand other documents say about the way in which the Inca state controlledthe territories and peoples under its aegis, we may make a few interpre-tive mistakes. Recent archaeological investigations seem to indicate that theInca did not occupy all the territories they conquered in the same way: thepolitico-administrative control mechanisms they devised varied substan-tially from location to location. The book compiled by Michael Malpass(1993) is an excellent example of what can be done when archaeologistscompare the results of their excavations to the data offered by documentsand chronicles:what the latter say is not alwaysconrmed byarchaeologicalresearch. On the contrary, settlements that documents present as importantadministrative centers do not always live up to this billing when their sitesare excavated. Conversely, some settlements thought to be of lesser impor-tance show a much more careful deployment of Inca administrative controland attention after the examination of archaeological data.

Whatshouldinterestusisthereconstructionofaculturalcontexta series of activities that go beyond the mere study of indigenous concep-

tions and thought. Without that context it is difcult to understand thecontent of those conceptions and thought that Mignolo and Rodolfo Kuschseek to retrieve from oblivion. From different theoretical and disciplinaryperspectives, Kusch (1977, 11) and Mignolo (1995b, 33) have proposed to


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understand the indigenous cultural past in a way that considers it not onlyas ethnographic material but as a way of thinking in its own right. I proposesomethingsimilar: to study howthat indigenous thinking manifests itself inthe continuity of human practices over a certain territorythat is, the usesof space that constitute the memory of landscape (Erickson 1993, 381). Thestudent of territorial conceptions and practices should keep in mind thatthe landscape capital they represent is always the result of material mod-ications of the land by human beings. And those material modicationsare not only manifestations of thinkingunderstood only as worldviewor knowledge productionbut also part of a broader, life-world context.Thus, I believe we should look not only for an archaeology of knowledge,but for an actual archaeology of living that focuses on the study of humanlife understood as a series of conceptions and practices. In sum, what I thinkis needed is an archaeology of living that does not differ much from whatKusch (1976, 84) proposed: to study indigenous subjects in the context of their cultural coherencewhich is tantamount to understanding culture asa strategy for living (98). Hence the need, for the Argentine philosopher, torecover life itself (100).11

In any case, the way in which we should recover that culturalcomplex of conceptions and practices that we call life should not excludethe help of archaeologists. In this respect, the efforts made bywhat is knownascognitivearchaeology(see Renfrew andZubrow1997)andpostprocessualarchaeology are extremely promising in their attempt to retrieve cognitivepatterns and traits, ancient knowledges and practices, from the preservedmaterial evidence. In this way, by joining forces with practitioners of otherdisciplines, it will be possible to get a little closer to those local knowledgesof the past understood as part of a way of lifeunderstood as living. Thisliving is perceived by us, twentieth-century scholars, as a materiality, asvestiges of human activities that could serve as a guide to the practices thatproduced them in remote times.

The idea is, then, to get a glimpse at the livesthe vital expe-riencesof those subjects from the past, in order to be able to incorporatethem as living contributions to contemporary human life. What I mean isthat the place of those subjects and their local knowledges from yesteryearin the present should have a status similar to the one we assign to modern

subjects and knowledges, because their contribution is also for humankindas a whole. Without that basic respect for the Others and their knowledges,itwillbe impossible to takeseriously the contributionof their knowledges tohumankind. This respect should be the point of departure of our research,


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understood less as a merely academic enterprise than as a detotalizing prac-tice of solidarity with the Other. I will come back to this topic in relation tothe Latin American subaltern studies agenda later in this essay.

The reconstruction of human activities in the territory should not onlycomprise the period covered by the life span of the so-called Amerindiansof historical time (that is, the ones encountered by Europeans on theirarrival in the continent) but also extend back in time to the activities of theso-called Paleo-Indians who preceded them. Thus, I suggest that we focuson those prehistoric cultures forgotten by most investigations in the eldof Latin American colonial studies, on those ethnic groups that did notorganize social life around urban centers or states: hunter-gatherers andearly agriculturalists, among others. In the case of the northern shore of theRo de la Plata, the Amerindians the Spaniards encountered at their arrivalhad been inhabiting the land since the year 2000 b.p. (before the present) (PiHugarte 1993, 55), which means that the fauna and ora of the territory hadbeen used by human beings before them. These ethnic groups of so-calledhistorical time did not operate, then, on a blank page, but on an alreadyinhabited, inscribed space. The Amerindians that preceded historical-timeIndians on the land not only used it but also altered the landscape: they leftvisible marks, architectural constructions, petroglyphs, and pictographs. Itis my contention that it is difcult (if not impossible) to attain a generalview of the spatial practices that preceded the arrival of the Spaniards if wedo not take into account the practices of the Amerindians of prehistorictime.

The cerritos de indiosor Indian mounds (visible earthen eleva-tions up to four meters high) aroused the interest of archaeologists at avery early date. 12 However, it is only since 1986 that the excavations of the Indian mounds of the easternmost part of Uruguay are being studiedsystematically. 13 The climate of the regionishumid and subtropical, and theland is mostly plain and surrounded by brooks and swamps (Bracco 1992,45). Those elevations have been built by human beings, whose practicesshow a deliberate occupation strategy (Ferrs in Vidart 1996, 140; LpezMazz and Bracco 1991, 5). The oldest of these mounds has been dated to5000 b.p. (Jos M. Lpez Mazz, personal communication, July 1999). The

resources available in the landscape, at that time, were more abundant thanwas believed before the series of excavations that began in 1986. The analy-ses of the remains of fauna found in the mounds show an abundance of big


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mammalsespecially deer that were much bigger than those now known(Lpez Mazz and Bracco 1992, 274).

Anotherkindoffoodavailablewas(andstillis)thenutsofthepalmtree( Buti capitata ), a tree that covers, today, around two hundredthousandhectares. It is estimated that at the time of the occupationof the mounds, thearea covered by the palms must have been even bigger (275). Archaeologistshave found evidence of consumption of the nut buti : burnt seedsa nd-ing that changes dramatically the archaeological panorama of the region asrepresented by traditional scholarship. The model proposed now describesa region populated by hunter-gatherers who exploited a highly productiveterritory. This model is possible thanks to the high return values (which isthe difference between investment and benet) of the available resources:cervidae and nutsconsidered, in archaeological literature, as the speciesof highest return value (276).

This economic picture, together with the high number of moundsfound, allows archaeologists to advance hypotheses that contradict ideaspredominant before the 1986 excavations. The model they propose todayis of a territory that hosted a highly concentrated population with eco-nomic strategies so efcient that they would tolerate a high investment of energy (the building of mound structures) without a utilitary return. Themodel attributes to these hunter-gatherers an annual exploitation of differ-ent environments following the seasonal cycle (277). To talk about seasonalexploitation of the land presupposes that these groups settled in differ-ent regions at different times during the year. In the case of the mounds,the available evidence suggests that the area where they are located wasoccupied during the spring and summer (Lpez Mazz 1995b, 94). The ex-ploitation of resources in the time frame provided by a particular season (orseasons) did not take place exclusively at the archaeological sites that hostthe mounds, but extended, also, to surrounding areas located beyond thetwenty-kilometer area proposed as a tentative limit for the site. The factthat seawolf fangs have been found at a site distant thirty kilometers fromthe coast suggests an exploitation of the land that connected the coastalzones with the lowlands where the mounds were located (Lpez Mazz andBracco 1992, 275). This assumption leads archaeologists to conclude thatthe groups who built the mounds had a certain degree of sedentism, which

adds still another discrepancy to the model of hunter-gatherers acceptedfor the region before 1986the latter are traditionally portrayed as smallgroupsofnomadicpeopleinconstantandunevenstruggleagainstthescarceresources offered by the environment (Lpez Mazz and Bracco 1989, 111).


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Lpez Mazz and Bracco (1992, 278) deduce the sedentism of the moundbuilders from the long time that the building of the structures took andfrom the abundance of resources offered by the environment.

Human remains have been found in some mounds. All of themare located in the central part of the structure but at different depths (Fe-menas et al. 1990, 348), which permits us to assume a funerary functionfor the mounds. There are also remains of combustion associated with theburials (351), which, interestingly, do not present the traits that are typicalof res used for housing or food preparation. Conversely, they seem to beclassiable as instances of ceremonial or ritual combustion (Lpez Mazz1992, 90). These funerary remains, which present a differential treatmentto diverse individuals, suggest a complex society with a rather sophisticatedorganization of communal labor (Lpez Mazz and Bracco 1989, 111). Thischaracteristic allows archaeologists to conjecture the incipient developmentof a nonegalitarian society (Lpez Mazz 1995a, 71). 14

Everything we know about the mounds points to the same con-clusion: the prehistoric inhabitants of the northern shore of the Ro de laPlata made inscriptions on the territory, and the activities they performedare part of the history of human practices that later developed in that sameterritory. That is to say, the markers they left are part of the landscape capi-tal inherited by the human beings who came later to those same lands. TheAmerindians of historical time did not fail to notice those markers, as theabundant documentation about the bichaderos (pyramids of stone built onthe elevations), which served as tombs for the Charrua Indians, suggests (PiHugarte 1993, 11718). 15 The rural inhabitants of modern Uruguay noticethem also, as is proved by the refuge they seek at the top of the moundsduring the frequent oods to which the region is subject. The Charruasand the rural inhabitants practices prolong, in this way, the useful life of the prehistoric mounds (Vidart 1996, 5455).

There are many other studies of prehistoric Amerindians thatshow a sharp contrast between what was believed about them and whatrecent archaeological investigations suggest. Let us consider now a casefrom the Andean Puna, where other hunter-gatherers offer us anotherimage of territorial practices that contradicts Occidental preconceived ideasabout the region and its prehistoric inhabitants. The Puna is a cold,

windy, and unfriendly environment, located four thousand meters high inthe Cordillera. Western scholars have paid much attention to the complexcultures that originated in the Lake Titicaca area, but little time and efforthave been devoted to the groups of hunter-gatherers that inhabited the area


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in the more remote past. Perhaps the cause of this lack of interest can befound in the marginal position of the Puna region in modern timeswhichmay make scholars believe its status was the same in the past, too. Yet themost recent studies of the region indicate that, hundreds of years ago, thePuna was a densely populated area (Rick 1980, 4). The natural resourcesavailable in that zone were, contrary to what was traditionally believed (dueto the lackofresearchonthismatter),capable ofproviding foodand housingtoahighnumberofhumanbeings.Thesurvivalanddevelopmentofadensepopulation was made possible by the relative stability of natural resourcesin the Puna, due to its absolute absence of seasons. This situation allowedthe dwellers of the region to exploit natural resources annually, withoutthe interruptions provoked by the need to emigrate to more productivezones. This kind of annual exploitation supports the new model of theregions early population proposed by John Rick: a dense population of hunter-gatherers with a high degree of sedentism (9).

This picture of the region contradicts all the assumptions we haduntil recently, and it allows us to view the area in a way that differs dramat-ically from the image Western culture has produced of it. The nutritionalhabits of these hunter-gatherers were limited, perhaps, to the consumptionof meat and other products obtained from the vicua, a member of thecamelidae family that was abundant in the region around Junin (an areacontaining the site of Pachamachay, from which most of the information Iuse in this essay comes). The presence of this animal in the region is annual.It lives in two kinds of basic groups: the band (comprised by a male indi-vidual and seven or eight females) and the troop (groups of several males,up to forty, who roam together). The band lives in a more or less xed ter-ritory, whereas the troop enjoys much more mobility (Rick 1980, 21). If onetakes into account that despite this animals very shy nature, it gets used tohuman presence with relative ease, and if one also takes into considerationthat its availability is annual and in a xed territory, one can conclude thatthe hunter-gatherers could not have had any trouble exploiting the vicuafor meat and other subproducts. According to Rick, the relatively constantnumbers of vicua population in the Junin area were possible because thearrival of the human being in the region may have displaced the other natu-ral predators dangerous to the camelidae. In this hypothesis, human beings

may have operated as high-level ecological regulators (23).For the Puna to become a suitable place for human beings it musthave offered, besides the permanent availability of vicua, the followingconditions: stone or bone for tools used in the exploitation of the camelids


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subproducts and adequate refugeswhether in the form of rock sheltersor caves. Both kinds of housing locations were (and are) very abundant inthe Puna (24). Moreover, in the archaeological sites excavated in the areawhich covers approximately 250 square metersresearchers have foundabundant proof of the existence of stone and bone tools.

Having provided proof of the existence of conditions for the sur-vival and development of human beings in the Junin area, archaeologistshad yet to prove the hypothesized sedentism of its inhabitants. In this re-spect, previous investigations about hunter-gatherers suggested two typesof exploitation that consisted in ( a) exhausting the resources of a given area,only to move afterward to another site, and ( b) avoiding exhausting theresources of the area, in which case a certain degree of sedentism is possible.In the case of Pachamachay, all the archaeological evidence found in therefuges that served as a base of operations, and in the sites that functionedas intermediate camps between the limits of the exploited territory and thebase of operations, suggests their almost permanent occupation.

In sum, the new model proposed contradicts several preconcep-tions on which the traditional representation of the prehistory of the regionwas based. It suggests that the area was densely populated by vicuas and byhuman beings whose occupational strategy was fundamentally sedentary.This is a very important point because the degree of sedentism at that time(roughly from 5000 to 2000 b.c. ) was such that it could have become thefoundation of a subsequent development of a culture of cattle shepherdsin the region. Let us say that if we superimpose a map of our way of rep-resenting the Puna as a human habitat upon what really occurred in thatareathat is, the territorial practices of the human beings who inhabitedit in prehistoric timewe will see a sort of palimpsest that will allow usto visualize that territory from a different kind of hermeneutics. That is,it will allow us to see an alternative representation of the territory and itsexploitation by human agents that differs substantially from the traditionalOccidental way of viewing it.

AnothersignicantcasestudyalsocomesfromtheAndeanzonemore concretely, from the Lake Titicaca area. I am referring to the practiceof a form of agriculture known as raised eldsa practice that wasestablished, approximately, between ve hundred and one thousand years

before the creation of the great states of the region (Erickson 1993, 411).In the northern zone, in the territory of modern-day Bolivia, this kind of agriculture began circa three thousand years ago but was abandoned forseveral centuries (around 300 a.d. ). It was used again between the years


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1000 and 1450 a.d. (Erickson 1992, 291). This technique for the exploitationof the land consists in building cultivable platforms, elevating them over thenatural surface of the soil through the accumulation of soil and debris takenfrom adjacent canals, in order to allowin oodable zonesthe water torunthrough thecanalswithout ooding thecultivable parcelof land.Raisedelds also guarantee the irrigation of the cultivable parcel during the dryseason, thereby creating an ecosystem three times richer than the prairie forthe growth of planted seeds. In this way, with the use of a single technique,the prehistoric peasants were able to kill two birds with one stone: theyensured theavailabilityof water duringthedryseasonandavoided oodingduring the rainy season (289).

However, these raised elds seem to have been abandoned afew years before the arrival of the Spaniards in the region. Today, theystill remain uncultivated. A group of scholars who practice experimentalarchaeologyusing prehistoric agricultural methods to see what resultscanbeobtainedthroughthemarecultivating,withthecollaborationoflo-cal indigenous families, some of the abandoned raised elds in the territoryof modern-day Bolivia. The results of these experiments are astounding.The complexity of social organization required for this kind of land ex-ploitation is surprisingly low. This means it is within the reach of familygroups, neighbors, or traditional Andean communities of the ayllus kind(Erickson 1992, 291). It has been found, besides, that the intensity of thework required for this kind of agricultural technique is only a little higherthan that needed for the practice of other traditional cultivation methods inthe region. Yet the most important result of the investigations now underway is that raised elds have proved to be a highly productive, efcient, andcheap form of cultivation. These conclusions contest the general opinionamong Occidental agronomy and economics experts that so-called tradi-tionalagricultural systems are backward, primitive, andantieconomic. Theraised elds method has proven to be efcient, even if we judge its resultsagainst capitalist standards.

Traditionally, intensive agriculture has been associated with stateorganization of labor, becauseso the hypothesis goesdensely populatedsocieties are supposed to require the application of a systematic type of land exploitation. However, these experiments suggest that the associa-

tion between intensive agriculture and state bureaucracy does not implya cause-effect nexus (Erickson 1993, 374). Another consequence of theseexperiments is, then, to allow us to see prehistoric indigenous culturesprevious to the great Andean states in a different light. They remind us of


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something we often forget: the so-called primitive peoples not only knewvery well what they were doing, but also are able to teach us, twentieth-century Occidental subjects, a few useful things.

The investigations that I have been describing resort to archaeologicalknowledge, to fossilized human activities that help us question the wayin which we view, nowadays, the space we inhabit. Our geographic and dis-cursive gaze is a Western device that has traditionally served the project of colonization of the American territory by European nations. 16 In this con-text, the New World has been customarily represented, according to Fred-erick Turner, as a savage land. That is, it has been depicted as somethingto be controlled or domesticated. This Western hostility to the Americanlandscapeananimus at thefoundation of theliterate city studied byAngelRama (1984)manifests itself as an overestimation of the globalizing gazeof the geographer, insofar as it is opposed to the indigenous chorographicknowledge of the space that constitutes human habitats (Boelhower 1987,5051). This colonial perspective still dominates our way of imagining thespace we inhabit, and its survival is possible thanks to the metaphor of theblank page that erases from our imaginary any trace of spatial or territorialpracticesof non-Europeanorigin. Thedehistoricization of the territoryandits dehumanization leave an imprint in our cognitive format, in our culture,and in our episteme. One of the possible ways to combat this situation is toopen interstices in our imaginary that allow us, once and for all, not onlyto acknowledge the territorial practices that took place before the arrival of the European subject, but also to acknowledge the presence and currencythey still have in our present landscape.

The perspective offered by this kind of study of the indigenouspast may seem, to some, related to a postcolonial theoretical framework.And that may indeed be the case: it all depends on what denition of postcolonial studies one is thinking of. For instance, Mignolo has tried, insome of his articles, to suggest connections between the Latin Americancolonial studies agenda and the postcolonial theory corpus. The way inwhichhehasmanagedtorelatebothdisciplinaryendeavorsisbyelaboratingon the notion of a postcolonial reason, which he denes as comprisingall those social actions, from writing to social movements, that left their

mark in history by contesting colonial domination (e.g., in Latin America,from Guaman Poma to Kattari in the Colonial Andes) and by looking foralternative ways of thinking and living (Mignolo 1994a, 66). In a similarvein, Sara Castro-Klarn (1999) has also been an advocate of a critical


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dialogue between both elds of study. She claims, while studying IncaGarcilaso as a postcolonial critic avant la lettrefollowing Bill Aschcroft,Gareth Grifths, andHelen Tifn (1989)thatthe postcolonialconditionis not a post-independence phenomenon but rather an effect of the imperialprocess from the moment of colonization to this day (14546). In thisframework, it seems, any critique of the colonial regimeeven those thattake place under colonial situationscan be considered postcolonial.

According to Castro-Klarn, in order to be able to talk aboutpostcolonialthinkinginLatinAmerica,itisnecessarytoprovideadenitionof modernity that would take into account the role Latin America had init (146). She nds that denition in Enrique Dussels work, especially in El encubrimiento del Otro (1994), where the Argentine philosopher traces theorigins of what he calls the myth of modernity back to the sixteenth centuryand the colonization of America. That myth was based on, among otherthings, the concealment of any contribution America and its inhabitantsmay have made to humankind. In other words, what Dussel is saying isthat modernity developed at the same time it occluded the rationality of its American Other, thus refusing to acknowledge not only the Othersknowledge, but also its own knowledge of the knowledge of the Other.In view of this grim genealogy, Dussels project proposes to salvage reasonand modernity through the destruction of the opposition between Self andOther as constitutive of the process of identity construction. 17

As Castro-Klarn (1999,149) pointsout, oneof theconsequencesof this kind of theorization is that it forces us to acknowledge the inuence of non-Western cultures in the formation of the Occidental subject. I believethat the representation of human activities in the territoryI am proposingthat is, as a long chain of which we, present-day dwellers, are only a linkis a step toward the completion of some of the goals Castro-Klarn seesin Dussels agenda. If we view our role in the territory as I suggest, wewill be more aware of the fact that our present is informed by works andpast activities produced by other humans who were not part of Westerncivilization. This acknowledgment will also help us represent ourselvesin a less arrogant way that admits that not only our historic but also ourprehistoric Others played an important role in our process of becomingwhat we are. For that prehistoric landscape they modied, so different

from the one we inhabit, is, somewhat, part of the latter. It is part of ourpresent if we conceive it from a diachronic perspective that understandsthe landscape as an evolving entity that is transformed by the interventionof human activities. The materiality of those marks, of those scars and


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mutations we see in the landscape, reminds us that some of them wereproduced by human beings, that a group of them operated on the territorybefore usthat is to say, that other human beings lived here and left alegacy. To incorporate those marks into our imaginary is a way, I believe,to make the Amerindian part of our cognitive horizonit is a way, also, toincorporate that Amerindian into the present, not just as our object of studybut as our equal. This acknowledgment of the Other in our quotidian life(that is, the participation of the Other in our present) can be, perhaps, anantidoteagainst thedenial ofcoevalnessJohannes Fabian(1983)describes,through which we put distance between the aborigine (understood as anobject of study who lives in a state of evolution different from, or inferiorto, ours) and us in our role of observers.

A research endeavor that attempts to obtain a better knowledge of indige-nous historic and prehistoric pasts runs the risk of becoming the task of an antiquarian. And this may end up happening if the scholar loses sightof the horizon of the colonial situation whose legacies we are undergoingin the present. The knowledge we produce does not mean anything if wedo not try to make it work in our present, if we do not attempt to helpchange the effect of the aforementioned colonial legacies. That is why weshould try to make academic knowledge available to the public, in orderto make an impact on the representation of indigenous subjects by the ed-ucational system (through changes in the versions offered by textbooks atthe primary, secondary, and tertiary levels) as well as by other state ideo-logical apparatuses. This plan of action supplements, in my opinion, theLatin American subaltern studies call for solidarity with the academiciansOthers (see Rabasa and Sanjins 1994, x). Moreover, a research agenda thatfocuses on the recovery of prehistoric and historic indigenous materialactivities in the land (that is, a recovery of precolonial lore) may also have,in other respects, some interest for those who subscribe toor view withsympathya subaltern studies agenda.

It is my contention that it is important to know who the producersof knowledge are and where they come from. Otherwise, their academicpractices may lose sight of some important facts. One of them is that thesescholars are part of the teaching machine that produces and reproduces

subalternity. As John Beverley has pointed out repeatedly (for example,1993, x; 1999, 1), literary studies and other humanistic disciplines havecontributed to the promotion and perpetuation of domination of subalternsubjects in both Latin America and the rest of the world. It should also be


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pointed out that scholars are, froma diachronic perspective, a product of thehistorical events that also produced the very situations of subalternity theyare studying. That is why it is necessary not only to revise the theoreticaltools we bring to the analysis of our object of study, but also to permanentlyquestion our role as practitioners of a discipline that has traditionally beenat the service of the dominant ideologythat is, at the service of the valuesand practices of the dominant groups. We must be aware, then, not onlyof the legacies we inherit from the modication of the American land byEuropeansubjectsthatresultedinanerasureofindigenoustracesinboththeterritoryandWesternthought,butalsoandespeciallyof thereservoirof representationsof indigenous culture that informtheprocesses that produceus, academics, as subjects. Those processes of subject construction affect allof us, regardless of ethnic or national origin, who produce our researchin Western languages and in the framework provided by the Westernacademy.

Havingsaidthat, I still believethatanagendathatpurports toshowsome kind of solidarity with the repressed Others of the West is possible. If we are aware of the legacies of Western modernity that limit our capacity tooffer our solidarity to the oppressed, we will be more likely to avoid them.Let menish thisarticle withanexample that illustrates how solidaritywiththe marginalized may come from the very site that produces the oppressionof theOther or thesubaltern: institutionalized Westernknowledgeitself. In1982, the government of Guyana used Western mapsan always effectiveand trustworthy tool for dominationto reduce the local Amerindiansholdings around their villages. To make things worse, mining and loggingactivities threatened the livelihood of the indigenous communities wholive in the upper Mazaruni River. The Amerindians, of course, lookedfor help. Interestingly, they found it in their longtime enemy: Westerncartography. An organization called Local Earth Observation provided theAmerindians of the region with handheld GPS (global positioning system)units, through which they located and named more than four thousandshing sites, hunting areas, and other territorial landmarks. With all thatinformation, produced by an unusual combination of ancestral indigenouschorographic lore and up-to-date Western cartographic technology, theymade a comprehensive map of the region they exploit for their livelihood.

Their legal claims are now based on that map.18

This recent case shows that a solidarity with the oppressed is pos-sible for subjects trained in Western knowledge. It also shows that thetechnology that was once used against subaltern subjects can be put to work


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in their favorthat is, to put cartography at the service of chorographyand not the other way around, as in the case of the Relaciones geogrcas.For those of us who work in the humanities, it is not easy to provide ad-vanced technology such as GPS, but we can nd other means to show oursolidarity. In the case of research projects that focus on cultures that nolonger exist as suchfor example, those from the northern shore of the Rode la Platato devise a strategy for solidarity with indigenous peoples is,obviously, a much more difcult task. However, it is my contention thateven for humanists who study geographic areas where indigenous culturesdo not exist at present, there are some things to do. One of them is toembrace the cause of the Amerindians beyond modern-day national andgeographic boundaries. Another oneprobably the most easily availablestrategy for humanistsis to go beyond an academic agenda that dislocatesoppressive epistemologies by attempting an intervention on the rst stages(primary and secondary) of the educational systemboth at a national andinternational level.

As I mentioned earlier, Latin American colonial studies scholarsshould try to change the ways in which indigenous peoples are representedtoday by state apparatusesmainly in the primary and secondary levelsof educationand the media. Such a strategy would, as in the case of theGPS,putaWesterntoolfordominationtheacademyattheserviceofitstraditional victims. Changing the way in which modern nations constructtheir pasts may seem a very modest goal, but it is, at least, a way of chang-ing the foundations of those national narratives that sometimes distort ordismiss the role of indigenous peoples in the construction of modernity andnational identity. A recovery of both their agency in the territory and themateriality of their culture from the prehistory to the present may helpchange the effects of the colonial legacies that render them insignicant tonational narratives. Then again, thereare many other possible ways to showsolidarity with subaltern subjects, as the alliance between indigenous terri-torial knowledge and Western academics in Guyana shows. We just needto develop an agenda for the intervention of scholars of Latin Americancolonial studies that goes beyond the boundaries of the academy.

If what characterizes a culture is, as Turner (1994, xxi) would haveit, a special relation with the land where it develops, it is plausible that the

way in which we live and think can be seriously affected by the way inwhich we imagine the territory. If we ignore the traces left by other humanbeings on the land we inhabit, we will have a distorted view of the groundon which we stand and we will ignore that we are living on a palimpsest


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that,modestlyandperhaps inadvertentlywe are contributing to enrich.I recently concluded an article (Verdesio 1999) by referring to my personalexperience with territorial indigenous traces for a period of four years (thatended in May 1999, the date on which I left my position at Louisiana StateUniversity). During those years, I used to walk several times a week, beforeor after my classes at Prescott Hall, across the parking lot called IndianMounds. The name, predictably, refers to two articial elevations made byprehistoric human beings. On their surfaces and in the surrounding area,students perform all kinds of activities: they drink a soda, have lunch, orsimply talk to each other. The many quotidian, sometimes noisy activitiesperformed by students on the mounds are in contrast to the silence thosestructures have kept, for our Occidental imaginary, for thousands of years(ve, to be more exact). However, it is possible to attempt to make thosemounds speak through an archaeological inquiry. We will not be able,of course, to have a true conversation with the site, but it will be possible,at least, to be certain of one thing: in the same space we inhabit, hundredsof years ago, generations of human beings that we insist on forgettingperformed a series of activities of which only a few (the building of themounds, for example) are known to us. We do not know much about theother activities they performed on that site, but it is clear that they modiedthe landscape, that they lived there. The material consequences of thoseactivities for our current habitat are not only visible but also, as the playfulLSU students on the mounds show, usable. If we are capable of using thematerial legacies of indigenous peoples from the past, we should be alsocapable of acknowledging their contributions to the present.

Notes

Small fragments from Verdesio 1999 appear in this essay.

1. I am using the expression colonial situationsin the sense given to it by Walter Mignolo

(1989b, 1994): the situation in which an ethnic minority, technologically ad-

vancedandpracticing Christianreligion, imposed itself onan ethnic majority,

technologically less advanced and practicing non-Christian religions. Colo-

nial situations are shaped by a process of transformation in which members

of both the colonized and the colonizing cultures enter into a particular kind

of human interaction, colonial semiosis, which, in turn, contributes to theconformation of the colonial situation.

2. One exception to this rule is Alvaro F. Bolaoss (1994) book on the Pijao Indians.


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3. Although the term prehistoric has Occidental overtonesbecause it suggests that

the advent of writing seems to start a new historical timeit is the most

widelyused oneinarchaeologyandhistoriographywhen it comes to referring

to remote times in the Americas. I will use the quotes, then, to signal my

awareness of the limitations of the term.4. There is a growing number of ethnohistoric works that account for indigenous cul-

tures outside the Inca, Maya, or Mexica traditions. In the case of the Andes

to mention just one of the major areasthe books by Sabine MacCormack

(1991), Karen Spalding (1984), Steve Stern (1982), and, especially, John Murra

(1980)whose fundamental studies on economic Andean systems have con-

tributed to a better understanding of the regionare good examples of

this. However, excellent investigations like theseand others with a simi-

lar approachdo not abound in the area of Latin American colonial studies

of literary or cultural studies afliation.

5. Azara was a very respected Spanish naturalist whose texts are fundamental for the

study of nature in the region by the end of the eighteenth century.

6. For a study of some of those testimonies by travelers, see the last chapter of Verdesio

2001a.

7. Sociologists talk, in general, about white settler colonies; ecologists (like Alfred

Crosby [1996]) prefer the term New Europes.

8. For a discussion of those changes, see Crosby 1972 and 1996 and Verdesio 2001b.

9. For a more comprehensive study of the Relaciones geogrcas, understood as complex

semiotic artifacts, see Mignolo 1990, 1989b, 1994b; and Mundy 1996.

10. Woods inspiration comes from the ideas by biologists Humberto Maturana and

Francisco Varela (1987, 7580) on the relationship between life forms and

their environment. He nds support for his arguments in the pages that

describe structural coupling.

11. Unfortunately,therestof Kuschsresearchfocusesonlyontherecoveryofindigenous

thought, forgetting about the broader project I have just described.

12. For a brief summary of the history of the studies on mounds found on Uruguayan

territory, see, among others, Bracco 1992, 44; Lpez Mazz and Bracco 1991,

46.

13. Those excavations have interested the general public for the rst time, as the 1996

media coverage of the excavations suggests (they were given a prime-time

spot on an important TV station).

14. Ina previousreport, archaeologists hadadvancedtheoppositehypothesis (ofanegal-itarian society), based on the mortuary-associated material (polished stones,

bones, fangs, and shell collars, among other objects) in the interments un-

der study (Femenas et al. 1990, 352). According to Joseph Tainter (1978,


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107), treatment of the dead in a differential way indicates the existence of

hierarchies in social stratication. Ritualunderstood as a communication

systemaccording to the same author, reveals information about the status

of the dead subject (113).

15. The use of mounds for funeral functions by Amerindians of historical time maybe a mere coincidence, but it might also be the consequence of imitative or

transculturated behavior. About the bichaderos little is known besides the

use of them that documents attribute to the Charruafor example, it is not

known whether the little stone pyramids were built by the Charrua or by

another ethnic group. For information about the bichaderos that have been

localized and their structure, see Femenas 1983.

16. On the imperial role of cartography as an ancillary science for the geographic gaze,

see Harley 1988, 282; 1990, 24.

17. Mignolo (1994a, 64), inspired by the same idea (the recognition of the contribution

of subaltern groups to humankind), has talked about the need to relocate

languages, peoples, and cultures in order conceive of the civilizing process as

the triumphal marchof thehumanspecies,of a variety ofcivilizingprocesses,

and not just the global spread of European/Western civilizations under the

banner of progress, civility and development.

18. A report on these mapping activities can be found in Carroll 2000.

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