UC Berkeley

Why do the oppressed not rebel, especially when they outnumber their oppressors? What are the social conditions for armed rebellion? Should we be focusing on armed rebellion rather than other kinds of resistance? This dissertation examines these general questions about the nature of social movements in the context of Spanish colonialism. Specifically, it unpacks the long term social conditions that enabled the conjuncture of local armed revolts and regional-scale rebellions in the late colonial period (late eighteenth/early nineteenth century) in Peru through a combination of archaeological and historical evidence. The primary case study is a village called Pomacocha, located in Vilcashuamán province in the modern region of Ayacucho, Peru.

By putting an important case study “under the microscope,” we can examine how local social conditions influenced regional social conditions for revolt and vice versa. Pomacocha was intensely affected by both Inka and Spanish colonialism and provides rare insight into the lives of the people whose labor sustained the colonial regimes. It began as a transplanted colony of agriculturalists (mitmaqkuna) to supply food for the nearby Inka palace and the Inka provincial capital of Vilcashuamán (Willka Wamán). After the Spanish conquest, the agricultural settlement at Pomacocha was abandoned. Later, an hacienda-obraje was established and a new native community sprang up around it. The area became a politically and economically important zone for the Spaniards. How did the materiality of social relations inform strategies of resistance by exploited laborers in the Andean village of Pomacocha? Historical documents attest to the poor working conditions and abuses at the textile workshop of Pomacocha during the Spanish colonial period, but no significant armed uprising occurred until after the Tupac Amaru II rebellion of 1781. To understand and contextualize the short-term and long-term causes of the late colonial upheaval, I analyze the long-term evolution of strategies of control and resistance at Pomacocha, starting with the Inka period. I combine archival research, archaeological excavations and surveys, analysis of material culture, surname analysis of censuses, and space syntax analysis to show that strategies of state control and bottom-up resistance coevolved from the Inka period, and that this coevolution resulted in a social landscape conducive to alliances across social groups in the late colonial period.

There has been little archaeological work aimed at understanding the relationship between forms of resistance and the materiality of social relationships of coerced laborers in the Inka and Spanish colonial periods. By understanding the effect of Inka and Spanish colonial institutions of labor on identity and social cohesion, we gain a better understanding of the motivations, enabling social conditions, and strategies of resistance to such institutions. By taking a long-term view of how the workers of a single community negotiated strategies of control of labor, my dissertation fleshes out a typical case study of the interplay among local motivations and wider social context for general rebellion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.