Introduction

March 2019 marked the beginning of an important year of commemoration in Nasca, Peru’s Ingenio Valley (Fig. 1). The communities of San José and San Pablo observed the 400th anniversary of their founding as vineyard haciendas by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) (Archivo General de la Nación [AGN] 1620, 1657). Over the last decade, the Proyecto Arqueológico Haciendas de Nasca (PAHN, Haciendas of Nasca Archaeological Project), the first archaeological project in Peru focused on slavery and the African diaspora, has conducted research on the valley’s former haciendas (Weaver 2015, 2016; Weaver, Muñoz et al. 2019). With major survey and excavation seasons in 2012, 2013, and 2018, PAHN has carried out archaeological and ethnohistorical research in close collaboration with the former estates’ modern descendant communities. These efforts have informed PAHN’s engagement in public discourse with government agencies and activists regarding the visibility of African-descendant culture and history in Peru. The past two years, a year of commemoration in 2019 and a year of critical reflection and Web-initiated outreach during the international COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, offered occasions to reflect on the valley’s history and archaeology’s place in valorizing Afro-Peruvian history and culture.

Fig. 1
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Location of towns and places in the Grande de Nasca drainage discussed in text. (Map by Brendan J. M. Weaver, 2020.)

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PAHN examines slavery and agroindustrialism among the African-descended population of Nasca’s former Jesuit haciendas. In the 18th century, San Joseph de la Nasca (now the town of San José) and San Francisco Xavier de la Nasca (San Javier) were the largest and most productive vineyards in the entire viceroyalty of Peru (Macera 1966:table 1), and many area residents trace their ancestry to these haciendas’ large enslaved populations. Since its inception, PAHN was envisioned as a project with a component aimed at engaging local descendant communities in an exploration of their history through material culture and archival documentation. It also engages a broader public in Peru—entering national conversations about the visibility of African descendants and their histories in Peru. The public and community-engaged archaeological methods employed by PAHN are nothing new in historical archaeology (LaRoche and Blakey 1997; Agbe-Davis 2010; Campos Akinruli 2020). They are, however, novel in the Andean context in their approach toward valorizing Afro-Peruvian culture and history within national discourse (Centro de Desarrollo Étnico 2008).

In this article we attempt a synthesis of our recent experiences working on the public and community-engaged aspects of PAHN. Weaver, trained in Andean historical archaeology and African-diaspora archaeology, initiated the project as dissertation research. Fhon has aided with PAHN’s official codirection and critical logistics since 2012. His experience and dedication to the public interpretation of archaeological research has been essential. As city archaeologist for the municipality of Lima, he directs several municipal exhibition halls and Peru’s only historical archaeology site museum, the Museo de Sitio Bodega y Quadra, an excavated colonial home once belonging to mariner Juan Francisco de Bodega y Quadra. Santana was an alumna of PAHN’s archaeological field-training program in 2013. A member of the descendant community raised in the district of El Ingenio and now a professional archaeologist, Santana is an important advisor to PAHN on public archaeology and community engagement. Together we explore the project’s attempts to address structures of inequity and invisibility among African descendants in Peru, as well as three specific activities over the past two years that illustrate community and public engagement with the archaeology of the Nasca haciendas. PAHN was invited to play an important role in San José’s quadricentenary commemoration, a culmination of years of work between community members and archaeologists. Also in 2019, PAHN partnered with the Peruvian Ministry of Culture to engage a broader public through a museum exhibition on the archaeological materials of the haciendas to mark the 165th anniversary of the country’s 1854 abolition of slavery. Subsequently, the 2020 international pandemic limited our efforts both in the field and laboratory, as well as our plans to move the exhibit to other cities within the country. However, in a weekly series of public archaeology videos posted on Facebook, we found renewed community and broader public engagement on the archaeology of slavery in the Nasca region. Through these varied approaches to the archaeology of slavery and hacienda as cultural heritage over the past two years, we consider the importance of maintaining engagement with multiple publics when normal activities are disrupted.

Toward an Engaged Afro-Peruvian Archaeology

During the colonial period (1532–1821), over 100,000 enslaved Africans were imported to Peru, according to the most conservative estimates (Aguirre 2000:64). Haciendas along the Pacific coast were the principal destination for most, although agricultural, mining, and textile production in the highlands also demanded enslaved labor (Bowser 1974; Arrelucea and Cosamalón Aguilar 2015). The viceregal capital, Lima, was a center dominated by a majority Afro-descended population throughout the colonial era––a population that included both enslaved and free peoples (Tardieu 2001; Jouve Martín 2008). Many of the African-descendant inhabitants of colonial Lima also had mixed European and/or indigenous ancestry. In the 2017 census, 828,841 Peruvians (3.6% of the national population) self-identified as being primarily of African descent (Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática [INEI] 2018b:51), although independent estimates are often much higher when considering African ancestry among the mestizo population. Despite the demographic and cultural impact of Peru’s sub-Saharan African heritage, the country shares a colonial legacy with other states throughout Latin America—a legacy that has rendered the Afro-descendant reality invisible and marginal to national identity and social equity in favor of a dominant mestizo national character (Minority Rights Group 1995; Rahier 2012). In contrast to the circum-Caribbean and Brazil, the African-descended population of the Pacific littoral of South America has been particularly abstracted by the emergence of Afro-Atlantic diasporic consciousness arising in response to political movements based on an international black identity (Feldman 2012; Chocano 2018).

A 2011 study directed by Peru’s Ministry of Culture found a continued

situation of vulnerability, invisibility and structural inequality that generates a negative impact on the full exercise of [the Afro-descendant population’s] rights and access to services, such that there is as a consequence, a process of stagnation in their integral development and social inclusion [translation by authors]. (Ministerio de Cultura 2017:7)

A 2015 study reported that 37% of Peru’s African-descendant population earned less than the minimum monthly wage of 750 soles (Ministerio de Cultura 2017:44). Afro-Peruvian activists attribute the systemic lack of attention to the problems of this vulnerable population to the limits of how Afro-Peruvian identity is understood and the legacies of colonial institutions that have institutionalized inequities and anti-blackness within the country. These activists point to a history of scholarship and activism having profound social impact in increasing Afro-Peruvian visibility; they identify a partial solution in greater national and international visibility through a partnership among communities, activists, and scholars (Dorival 2018).

Afro-Peruvian social movements that began with 1950s musical and dance revivals, led by poet and musicologist Nicomedes Santa Cruz and his sister, dance choreographer Victoria Santa Cruz, established a place for an agenda of multicultural Afro-descendant inclusion within national discourse (Feldman 2006). The revival also invented the tradition for a new narrative of blackness that elevated several local traditions at the expense of other regional expressions of black arts, oral traditions, and forms of identification. Places like El Carmen of Chincha Baja on the south coast and Zaña on the north coast became synonymous with Afro-Peru. Ultimately, the success of the Afro-Peruvian revival also had the unintended negative effect of propagating and popularizing a flattened and essentialist representation of Afro-Peruvian culture and furthering the misconceptions of Afro-descendants as inherently physical, rhythmic, musical, and possessing an embodied sexuality. Despite such efforts, there remains a lack of broader understanding of the contributions of Afro-descendants to Peruvian culture, relegating “African” representations to music, dance, sports, and, most recently, gastronomy (Dávila Pavón and Campos 2011), and there is generally a lack of understanding of the colonial roots of these representations (Velásquez Castro 2005).

These representations of Afro-Peru have also had the effect of defining, in the Peruvian popular imagination, who Afro-Peruvians are and where they are from. The racialized geographies resulting from the successful influence of the Santa Cruzes’ cultural renaissance mean that certain localities are considered to be, authentically, the home of Afro-Peruvian culture, while others lack recognition. This is especially impactful in a country where phenotype is not a prime characteristic of blackness, and often the memory of African ancestry and slavery are secondary to black self-identification (Golash-Boza 2011). Across the Andean region, Afro-Andeans are often regarded as anomalies in national discourse, neither fully African nor fully Andean (Arteaga Muñoz and Rocca Torres 2007; Rahier and Prosper 2014).

For these reasons, studies centered in communities beyond the national canon of blackness that seek to connect the colonial processes in which Afro-Peru had its genesis to the current reality are needed. Archaeology offers a critical vantage, using material evidence to reveal intimate details of the daily lives of Afro-Peruvians in the past through engagement with material culture. Specifically, public-facing and community-engaged archaeology has the potential to elevate the visibility of the histories and cultures of Afro-Peruvian communities, especially those beyond the canon of black geography.

Archaeology at San José and San Javier

In recent years, historical archaeology has matured as a discipline in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Andean Chile, Argentina, and Colombia, with an explosion of new research by both foreign and national archaeologists (Martín et al. 2012; VanValkenburgh et al. 2016; Saucedo Segami and Chirinos Ogata 2020). Andeanist historical archaeology offers a way of bridging diverse datasets and connecting the deep past to the ethnographic present, especially given the region’s rich ethnographic, ethnohistorical, and pre-Columbian archaeological records (Van Buren 2016). However, research on the African diaspora in western and Andean South America has only accounted for a fraction of this new turn toward historical archaeology (Mantilla Oliveros 2016). Although PAHN was established in 2009 as the first project in Peru focused on the material culture of the African diaspora, it was not the first to identify Afro-Peruvian archaeology as potentially transformative for national discourse. In the 1970s, Isabel Flores, Rubén García, and Lorenzo Huertas excavated the colonial Casa Osambela in Lima’s historic city center and identified ceramic pipes that resonated with African-diasporic material culture, raising the potential for a more inclusive Peruvian archaeology (Flores Espinoza et al. 1981; Rubén Garcia Soto 2013, pers. comm.). Greg Smith (1997) reinterpreted the results of his dissertation research with Prudence Rice’s Moquegua Bodega Project in the light of new archival sources pointing to the importance of African-descended potters for the vineyard haciendas of southern Peru’s Osmore Drainage. Most recently, PAHN co-director Fhon highlighted the importance of the Afro-Peruvian presence at elite colonial-era households in Lima in his public interpretation of the archaeology at the Bodega y Quadra Museum. PAHN drew inspiration regarding the potential of Afro-Peruvian archaeological research from these scholars. In a country where archaeology has played such an important role in the development of national identity, we have taken on the particular aim of enacting positive social and political change through increased visibility of Afro-Peruvian history and culture.

The early history of Nasca’s Ingenio Valley is one in which rapid indigenous depopulation and agricultural experimentation with Old World crops led to the establishment of a significant enslaved population of African descent. In the 1530s and 1540s, postconquest violence and waves of epidemic disease hastened the relocation of the indigenous population away from Nasca’s Ingenio Valley (de Cieza de León 1984:295). By the mid-1540s, Spanish families began to plant sugarcane and erected an ingenio, or sugar mill, from which the Ingenio Valley took its name (AGN 1620). By the end of the 16th century, planters found the valley to be more suitable for grape vines, and production turned to viticulture. When the Jesuits acquired their first properties in the valley in 1619, the region was already famous for its wines. In 1614, Juan Francisco de Arias Maldonado acquired land in the valley and planted a vineyard, calling his property the “Hacienda de El Ingenio de la Nasca.” Jesuits from the Colegio Grande de la Transfiguración de Cuzco took interest in the property and purchased it along with the six enslaved Africans who worked the vineyard (AGN 1620:228r). On 19 March 1619, St. Joseph’s Day, Fr. Diego de Virues, SJ, took possession of the hacienda, rechristening it the Hacienda San Joseph de la Nasca. The vineyard quickly became an important resource for funding Jesuit higher education in Cuzco. Also in 1619, Jesuits of the Colegio Máximo de San Pablo of Lima obtained their first property in the valley, San Pablo de la Nasca (AGN 1657). Later, in 1657, the Lima Jesuits bought the property of San Xavier, and San Pablo became an annex of San Xavier. Together, San Xavier and San Joseph were the two most important vineyards in the viceroyalty by the time of the 1767 Jesuit expulsion from the Spanish Empire.

At the time of the expulsion, the two Nasca haciendas had a combined population of 584 enslaved individuals (Archivo Nacional de Chile 1767a, 1767b). Slave inventories from this time listing African ethnonyms as surnames for some of the enslaved men have been of particular interest to residents. Some families have preserved memory of descending from specific African “naciones,” such as Congo, which they see reflected among possible ancestors in the inventories. These documents, discussed with community members early in the planning phases for the archaeological research, spurred community curiosity about the potential for archaeological research to discover more about the daily lives of these ancestors and their families.

In most years of active fieldwork, PAHN has conducted survey and excavation in the very spaces in which descendant communities live and work. This close contact has presented methodological difficulties for minimizing the effects of archaeological interventions on daily life, but has also presented the opportunity for increased engagement and visibility—both essential for building trust and moving the project forward with community interests. Academic project goals and community interests converged in discovering the past built environment and spatial layout of the colonial haciendas. During PAHN’s excavations at San José and San Javier in 2012 and 2013, residents were often curious about which past activities were carried out in which parts of town (Fig. 2). Weaver and Fhon’s academic interests to investigate the fullest possible range of lived experiences, including domestic, productive, and religious spaces, dovetailed with community interests in allowing excavations across varied spaces at the former estates’ domestic and productive cores.

Fig. 2
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Archaeological interventions at the towns of San Javier and San José. (Maps by Brendan J. M. Weaver, 2013.)

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At both San José and San Javier, PAHN developed, in partnership with the residents, a set of best operating practices. One such practice involves the treatment of encountered human remains. Recent construction has disturbed disarticulated human remains in the towns, and historical documentation describes slave cemeteries attached to the haciendas’ chapel yards. We specifically avoid the excavation of human remains to respect the communities’ ancestors, purposefully placed in sacred ground. Using archival data and extensive geophysical survey, we have chosen to excavate areas with low probability of yielding interments, instead focusing on domestic and productive areas of the sites.

At San José, a family living on the hacienda plaza allowed our team to excavate a trench within the front room of their home while it was under renovation. Excavations revealed an 18th-century formal bricked floor, suggesting an official administrative space. Another resident granted us permission to excavate in front of the doorway to a house she rents to seasonal workers. The house is located on a promontory overlooking the old hacienda plaza and ruins of the Jesuit-era chapel. This space revealed 17th- and 18th-century domestic middens and adobe foundations of two residences likely belonging to enslaved families. The son of the last hacienda owner repurchased San José’s historic casa hacienda in the 1970s. Deeply interested in the history of his home, he offered us the opportunity to excavate its courtyard, revealing a colonial-period livestock paddock and an earlier domestic space. Three other areas were excavated in town, including: (1) an area near the elementary school, revealing a workshop, (2) a space behind the ruins of the chapel, yielding a robust adobe platform and workshop space, and (3) an area within the modern town plaza, where we located a colonial adobe wall retaining a midden consisting of alternating strata of domestic and agro-industrial refuse.

At San Javier, two residents offered spaces for excavation in their gardens, one of which revealed postholes and the floor of a slave household. A unit within the street adjacent to the community sports court was excavated, revealing a ceramics kiln, and 9 m2 was excavated within the plaza in front of the ruins of San Javier’s Jesuit chapel. This last context located a 17th-century hacienda structure seemingly abandoned after an earthquake event and prior to the construction of the extant chapel.

The excavations in the towns of San José and San Javier have resulted in a number of findings revealing daily life among the 17th- and 18th-century enslaved populations. The spatial and material conditions of the estates revealed that the Jesuit hacienda administration deployed coercive technologies embodying an ideology of labor as Christian discipline (Weaver 2016, 2018). Excavations of household middens demonstrated the intertwined nature of domestic and agro-industrial activities of enslaved residents, evidenced by refuse from productive tasks performed within domestic spaces (Weaver, Muñoz et al. 2019). Still, enslaved actors found modes for expression and the building of meaning, as demonstrated in material correlates of slave-made ceramics and foodways, through which signs were evoked referencing aspects of Atlantic African political, religious, and culinary traditions (Weaver 2021). Paleoethnobotanical and zooarchaeological analysis of domestic refuse has revealed that, while meat rations provisioned by the estate were likely insufficient, proteins and other nutrients were supplemented through usufruct gardens and small-animal husbandry. Atlantic African culinary aesthetics were evoked through the production of one-pot meals and the cultivation of flavors and textures available in self-provisioned supplements (Weaver, Muñoz et al. 2019).

Community insight has also opened up new questions and modes of interpreting the material reminders of the hacienda past in the communities. The post-hacienda Ingenio Valley is host to great diversity in the ways individuals understand their relationships to their communities, the valley’s past, and the material remains of the hacienda period. Yet, at both San José and San Javier, there exists a rich and textured oral tradition surrounding the physical reminders of the hacienda period (1619–1968), indexing anxieties from that time as well as the communities’ more recent, complicated histories (Weaver 2020b). Narratives, evoked through daily engagement with standing architecture, ruins, and other physical reminders of the former estates, relate the modern communities’ diversely experienced relationship to multiple, sometimes traumatic, historical events stretching from recent collective memory into the deep colonial past. The more remote hacienda past, particularly the time of slavery, is understood through analogy to more recent struggles within the communities.

Public Archaeology and Community Engagement at the Haciendas of Nasca

Internationally, archaeologists have long mobilized projects to enact positive social and political change through engaging publics beyond the academic discipline (McGuire 2008; Tantaleán and Aguilar 2013). From its inception, PAHN was intended to be a specific form of public archaeology aligned with what Jeremy Sabloff (2008:17) has called “action archaeology,” archaeological practice that specifically engages “problems facing the modern world.” To be clear, PAHN began with a traditional academic research agenda, posing research questions about the daily lived experiences of enslaved individuals in the past and their strategies for survival and cultural creativity. This research frame, however, dovetails with public and activist ambitions brought to the fore in Weaver’s partnership with Fhon. As public-facing archaeology, PAHN aims to increase visibility of Afro-Peruvian heritage, history, and material culture, and instigate multiscale conversations about the legacies of slavery, racism, and systemic inequality.

The prospect for local conversations and engagement with descendant communities was one of the reasons that Weaver and Fhon chose to initiate research at the former Jesuit haciendas of Nasca. During the 1968 agrarian reforms, the privately owned haciendas were state expropriated, eventually becoming independent towns (Weaver 2020b:162–167). In contrast to most rural archaeological projects in Peru, which often investigate pre-Hispanic sites far from populated centers, the focus of PAHN’s research is in the very spaces occupied by the descendant communities. Initial discussions in the project’s early years demonstrated that not only would the communities of San José and San Javier welcome our research, but some residents desired to participate actively in its planning, development of research questions, and interpretations and dissemination of results.

It was this interest that led early university-student Santana, a member of the descendant community and resident of Estudiantes, a former annex of San Joseph, to a field practicum with PAHN and to later become a member of the project’s research team. Early on, the experience led her to questions and concerns that she had as an Afro-descendant and an indigenous woman from the Ingenio Valley, which were incorporated and mutually worked within the project. Yet Santana was not the only person involved in this dynamic and heard, firsthand, intimate similar sentiments about the project from other community members. Afro-descendant residents of the valley were interested in this history, which they largely only knew about through stories and myths. The communities formulated questions: What is our history? Is our religious tradition the same as was celebrated by the people who lived on the colonial haciendas? San José and San Javier developed activities, incorporated PAHN into their traditional celebrations, and adapted the project to their real and current needs. Santana finds that this has given the communities the tools to know and understand their historical trajectory and place in Peruvian history. She has watched as her own family and neighbors became active actors in a project that has decided not only to let the population watch and listen, but also to be involved as part of a team. In this way, the descendant communities have directly engaged and shaped the scientific discourse.

Communities in Nasca and Palpa have varying relationships to the histories of the region’s haciendas due to the unique historical circumstances related to slavery, forced migration, economic disenfranchisement, and strained community relations during the time of the agricultural cooperatives that briefly succeeded the haciendas after the agrarian reform, leading residents to identify their heritage in diverse ways. The histories of labor and the migrations to and from the former haciendas have had profound impacts on community development and the ways these communities relate to the past and the legacies of slavery and coerced labor (Weaver 2020b). Two particular historical moments had profound and lasting demographic effects, visible in the diverse ways the communities relate to the former haciendas: (1) the mid-19th century, when African slavery was replaced by a system of indentured Chinese labor and migratory wage labor, and (2) when the coastal haciendas of the region incorporated as towns after the agrarian reform. Recent memory of the late hacienda period and agrarian reform far outweighs an active historical awareness of slavery or the colonial estates. Due to the tumultuous history of demographic shifts and large-scale migrations after the abolition of slavery in 1854, most identify as mestizo, a mixed heritage recognizing their families’ origins as African, Chinese, native Andean, European, and coastal criollo (INEI 2018a:2734). Still, many residents, like Santana, acknowledge or claim descent from the haciendas’ large enslaved Afro-Andean population.

Community members actively embraced historical archaeology as a tool for constructing cohesive historical narratives of their communities’ origins. Older residents have explicitly commented on the project’s importance for giving youth a sense of identity as they migrate to larger cities like Ica or Lima pursuing work or higher education. Through conversation and direct engagement with source material and artifacts, PAHN and residents have synthesized a new narrative, recovering that which lies beyond collective memory. Elders repeatedly emphasized the importance of building an understanding of their communities’ earliest origins. The communities also pride themselves on being among Peru’s oldest producers of wine and aguardiente de la uva (a beverage today called “pisco”), and the archaeology of this production by their enslaved and free ancestors offers a tangible connection to this heritage.

Across the international African diaspora, archaeological interventions often begin with specific research aims or broader political motivations, but are transformed through local discourse (LaRoche and Blakey 1997; Lima et al. 2014; Balanzátegui Moreno 2018; Dunnavant et al. 2018). Our efforts owe a debt of inspiration and methodology to pioneering work across the African diaspora and among indigenous peoples—we recognize that even our use of the term “descendant community” was first used in public archaeology by New York City’s African Burial Ground Project (LaRoche and Blakey 1997). In South America, one of the best-known recent examples of public archaeology that sought to engage both national discourse and local African-descendant populations is Rio de Janeiro’s Valongo Wharf, Brazil’s main point of disembarkation for enslaved Africans (Lima et al. 2014). Director Tania Andrade Lima reached out to black activists and community leaders who formed an important partnership to recontextualize the wharf as the centerpiece of Rio’s sites of African heritage (Cicalo 2015), eventually becoming a UNESCO world-heritage site in 2017. In the Andean region, Caterina Mantilla has carried out an archaeological collaboration with the descendant community of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia. The town had its origins as a maroon settlement in the late 16th century. Mantilla’s close partnership with residents of San Basilio allowed for the collaborative reconstruction of the town’s spatial history along with the materialized memory of the community’s struggle for freedom (Mantilla Oliveros 2010).

Much like PAHN, these projects engage the nonacademic public and descendant communities at various scales in the coproduction of knowledge, recontextualization of heritage sites, and confronting of structural racism and inequities. PAHN began with a traditional academic frame and activist ambitions of transforming broader public discourse about Afro-Peruvian heritage, but through early community engagement was faced with new possibilities and purposes. Ecuadorian archaeologist Daniela Balanzátegui Moreno (2018) offers a model of Afro-Andean collaborative archaeology that might qualify as a brand of community archaeology (Atalay 2012) or a form of indigenous archaeology (Watkins 2000), but to which she refers as “archaeology by demand,” drawing on Rita Segato’s (2015) concept of antropología por demanda (anthropology by demand). While researching slavery at hacienda spaces in the Chota Mira Valley, local Afro-Ecuadorian activists approached Balanzátegui, requesting assistance in the archaeological recuperation of a local historical cemetery. Together, the Afro-Ecuadorian communities of La Concepción and Balanzátegui integrated archaeological research into a project to revitalize the Afro-Ecuadorian cemetery “Garden of Memory, Martina Carillo.” This project had its genesis in a community need and developed out of community questions. In contrast, PAHN’s origins were scholarly and aimed to make visible the materiality of Afro-Peruvian heritage. However, years of public and community engagement at multiple scales, building a close relationship with local community leaders and descendants, has transformed the purpose of our project and shaped its development, bringing PAHN closer to Balanzátegui’s model.

Archaeological Heritage and New Directions

The large late-baroque chapels built by the Jesuit hacienda administration in the 1740s are the most notable architectural features of San José and San Javier. Their ruins loom over the towns and are generally both a source of pride and embarrassment in their deteriorated states. The structures also serve as reminders of slavery and the hacienda period for many residents and, as such, are complicated signs on the towns’ landscapes. Some community members view PAHN as a way to garner broader attention for these chapel ruins. According to many, the chapels should be stabilized or restored, serving as a resource for the community and potentially drawing foreign and national tourists.

The San José and San Javier communities have long maintained the chapels’ ruins. However, PAHN has revitalized interest in stewardship, especially among the younger generation. Groups of residents have autonomously organized work parties, locally called faenas, to pick up garbage and debris around the historic hacienda cores. At San Javier, when a garbage fire jeopardized two early 18th-century huarango-wood beams from two of the estate’s winepresses, residents stepped in to save the beams and secure them. Each about 10 m in length, the beams had long rested along the chapel’s southern elevation. The concerned residents recruited neighbors to lift and clean the heavy beams, pushing them out of the street, cleaning the area around them, and installing a fence. A community elder at San Javier remarked that, prior to PAHN, the state of the beams would have gone unnoticed and a faena to salvage and protect them would never have happened. The communities have always maintained a strong sense of their material heritage, but discourse through PAHN has made this heritage more visible, especially among youth.

Beginning in 2018, PAHN initiated excavation and geophysical survey at the site of the Hacienda La Ventilla, an 18th-century annex of San Joseph. Located across the Ingenio River from San José, the site is the only abandoned former Jesuit hacienda or annex property, as the others have all become modern towns. Our efforts at La Ventilla have involved excavation of the distillery complex, which is among the oldest of its kind in Peru. In addition to our interest in the productive experience of the enslaved laborers working at the distillery, this line of investigation is particularly important for the communities of the Ingenio Valley, which pride themselves on being among the most important centers of pisco production in colonial Peru, a distinction now held by the Ica Valley to the north.

Our work at La Ventilla has also opened new avenues of research guided by community interests. Beyond its importance as an historical center of pisco production, for several communities in the valley La Ventilla is prominent in the oral tradition surrounding a local hero and abolitionist, Tomasa Alcalá, or Mamalá, who is said to have been enslaved at the site. In the mid-19th century, La Banda became the first free black community in the Ingenio Valley. This descendant community traces its origins to the haciendas, regarding Alcalá as a founding figure. La Banda invited PAHN to consider examining evidence at La Ventilla for the 19th-century transition from slavery to freedom and to work at the town of La Banda.

The development of personal relationships between PAHN archaeologists and community members has not only enriched the experience of those involved, but also offered crucial support for the project. During both field and lab seasons PAHN has made its center of operations in the community of Llipata, a modern-day annex of Palpa and a colonial hacienda annex of San Joseph. There, residents Señora Vicenta Guerra and her mother, Señora Teodosia Chipana, offered their friendship and logistical support, eventually being named madrinas (godmothers) of PAHN and, by extension, familial sponsors of Weaver. In the Andean region fictive kinship is an important way of creating lifelong reciprocal relationships that extend both parties’ familial and social networks. Guerra and Chipana have provided immensurable logistical and moral support to the project. Guerra serves as an important connection among community stakeholders, often visiting San José, San Javier, and La Banda, and lending support for faenas.

Commemorating 400 Years of Community, 1619–2019

PAHN’s research played a crucial role in the rediscovery of the original property titles and 1619 date for the founding of the first Jesuit estates in Nasca. For this reason, and because of PAHN’s close relationships with many of the families in the community, the project was asked to participate in the observation of San José’s annual St. Joseph’s Feast Day celebration on 19 March 2019. Local organizers strategically utilized their partnership with PAHN to reinforce the cultural and historical significance of their community and impress upon the municipal and regional governments the antiquity of their heritage with the importance of the quadricentenary. For San José’s community leaders, PAHN offered a sense of legitimacy to the importance of San José as a place with a rich and important history. Moreover, PAHN’s place in the commemoration events represents the culmination of a decade-long relationship through which San José residents reflected on their community’s history through archaeological and historical inquiry.

Residents claim that the fiesta de San José is the community’s oldest tradition, and this certainly may be the case, as the Jesuit property title notes that Fr. Virues celebrated the Hacienda San Joseph’s first Mass on St. Joseph’s Day in 1619. No previous accounts of the festival have been published, and local documentation revealing changes beyond recent years is scant. Traditionally the festivities are structured by a novena of Masses in the evenings leading up to 18 March, the eve of St. Joseph’s Day. Masses are now celebrated in a new chapel, where the 18th-century statues of St. Joseph and the Virgin, the animate and sacred pride of the community, are housed. Each of the nine Masses is sponsored by a local family, paying to bring a priest from nearby Palpa and often gifting small remembrances to attendees. Residents and their families visiting from Nasca, Ica, or Lima hold a vespers Mass and then celebrate with a party in the old Jesuit plaza. A stage was erected and a cumbia band was brought from Ica to play after Mass, while sponsors dished a stew to attendees and revelers toasted with pisco and danced.

This particular year, Weaver, as director of PAHN, was asked to offer a speech at midnight, highlighting the importance of the quadricentenary and reflecting on the relevance of the community partnership in the archaeological project. The day of the 18th, he was brought to the municipality of El Ingenio by San José community leaders to follow up on requests sent weeks in advance by the community to the mayor for support for the year’s events. The monetary and in-kind support was never given, but the mayor graciously agreed to make an appearance at San José’s party and to introduce the midnight talk. Weaver was also accompanied on stage by a favored son of San José, a medical doctor now living in Lima, who offered words of encouragement to his home village and remarked on their rich heritage. Weaver’s short speech during the commemoration was received by an attentive audience eagerly awaiting the fireworks display that followed (Fig. 3). Many asked for printed copies of his remarks, and he was also brought to the home of the valley’s radio-station operator to record a version of the talk for a replay broadcast.

Fig. 3
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Fireworks display at midnight, St. Joseph’s Day 2019, in front of the ruins of the colonial Jesuit chapel at San José. (Photo by Brendan J. M. Weaver, 2019.)

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On the evening of the 19th, a joyful procession with the baroque statue of St. Joseph was the final event of the patron saint’s feast (Fig. 4). Older residents insist that this aspect of the celebration has been practiced since time immemorial. The wooden litter was now festooned with fluorescent lightbulbs, powered by a gasoline generator carted behind the saint. A brass band from Palpa was contracted to accompany the procession, and those carrying the litter jubilantly danced while marching from the plaza around the perimeter of the town, stopping at the four corners for prayers. The oration and prayers were led by two women who have been instrumental in the community organization around PAHN. Certainly, without Señora Juana Paz, an Afro-Peruvian elder in the community, many of the town’s traditions might have already died out, and her enthusiasm for history and community identity is contagious. At each of the town’s four corners, Juana referenced the traditions and perseverance of San José’s ancestors and urged her neighbors to reflect with pride upon the survival of the community over the past 400 years (Fig. 5).

Fig. 4
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Procession with the 18th-century St. Joseph statue on 19 March 2019 at San José, in front of the ruins of the Jesuit chapel. (Photo by Brendan J. M. Weaver, 2019.)

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Fig. 5
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Juana Paz leading a prayer to St. Joseph at the northern corner of San José during the procession on 19 March 2019. (Photo by Brendan J. M. Weaver, 2019.)

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Regional and National Engagement: The Ica Museum Exhibit, 2019

As described above, PAHN’s public archaeological platform is twofold: to serve and engage the local descendant communities of the haciendas of Nasca and also engage broader regional and national cultural discourse by confronting anti-blackness and Afro-Peruvian invisibility. Afro-Peruvian communities in the departmental capital of Ica and the national capital, Lima, are connected to Nasca through historical processes of migration as well as real and fictive kinship. PAHN’s museum exhibition at the National Regional Museum of Ica “Adolfo Bermúdez Jenkins,” was aimed at raising the visibility of Afro-Peruvian histories at the regional level and involving national partners. It had its genesis at an August meeting of the Afro-Peruvian Working Group, an organization composed of representatives from Afro-descendant communities around the country, convened and sponsored by the Department of Afro-Peruvian Affairs (Dirección de Políticas para Población Afroperuana, hereafter DPPA). Weaver was invited by Susana Matute Charún, director of DPPA, to discuss PAHN with members of the working group. In attendance were authorities from Ica’s regional government who were very interested in cementing positive relationships with the Ministry of Culture through partial sponsorship of the December exhibition. The core partners at the Regional Museum of Ica, DPPA, and the cultural director of Ica’s regional government were essential in launching the first museum exhibition of Afro-Peruvian archaeological material culture. The exhibit included 22 sets of artifacts and 9 expository wall panels on themes dealing with hacienda life and agro-industrial production in the 17th and 18th centuries. PAHN’s participation in the commemoration activities for the important anniversaries in 2019 demonstrated how stakeholders at the local and regional levels engage archaeological heritage as a political tool aimed at integrating Afro-Peruvian ancestors into a broader heritage narrative and, at the same time, raise the visibility of descendant communities.

The first organizational meeting for the exhibit took place in early October in El Ingenio. In attendance were members of the descendant communities, representatives from the Ministry of Culture, El Ingenio’s mayor and aldermen, and Fhon. The content, themes, and style of presentation of the panels and artifacts were discussed and agreed upon by all. It was especially understood that one of the panels should contextualize the importance of the archaeological heritage to the descendant communities and include photographs from San José’s quadricentenary celebration. There was local interest in first exhibiting some artifacts and informational panels in El Ingenio ahead of the opening in Ica. However, due to a lack of funding, the officials present decided it was more important to focus on the exhibit in the department’s capital, hoping to engage a broader audience that might learn about the history of the Ingenio Valley. The decision to focus on Ica, a two-hour drive north of El Ingenio, was understood as strategic for inserting local heritage into a broader narrative.

The 3 December 2019 date for the exposition’s opening was significant, as it marked the 165th anniversary of the abolition of slavery (Figs. 6, 7). We titled the exhibit: “The Archaeology of Slavery at the Haciendas of Nasca: 165 years of Freedom, 1854–2019.” In 1854, the president of the republic, Ramon Castilla, took a bold stance against the monopoly of coastal hacienda owners and abolished slavery in the country. The process of liberation in the Ingenio Valley was drawn out and violent, especially since the owner of the former Jesuit estates in the valley was Domingo Elias, a well-known political enemy of Castilla (Echenique 1952:104; Saponara 2008). Liberation is recounted in oral history through the figure of Mamalá, a literate enslaved woman in Elias’s household who read about abolition in the newspapers and announced the news to her enslaved compatriots and later founded the town of La Banda (Rupire Rojas 2018:144; Weaver 2020b:160). Located along an agriculturally marginal stretch of riverbank opposite San José and San Javier, the ancestors of La Banda residents are often referred to as “cimarrones”—those who escaped slavery as hacienda labor transitioned from enslaved to indentured and migratory. The local narrative of abolition is one in which enslaved people are front and center, liberating themselves through struggle and perseverance, rather than having freedom passively granted to them by political elites in Lima.

Fig. 6
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Opening night reception for PAHN’s archaeological exhibition at the Museo Regional de Ica, 3 December 2019. (Photo by Mafe Boza, 2019.)

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Fig. 7
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Museo Regional de Ica, 3 December 2019: Left to right: Rodolfo Lopez Guillen (San José resident and pisco producer), Brendan Weaver (director of PAHN), and Susana Matute Charún (director of DPPA). (Photo by Mafe Boza, 2019.)

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Weaver and Fhon developed the exhibit in concert, drawing on Fhon’s extensive experience in museology. Fhon’s understanding of how publics in Peru differentially engage historical materials vs. pre-Hispanic artifacts was essential to making the exhibit more didactic. We organized the Ica exhibit into an introduction and eight themes: “The Built Environment of the Haciendas,” “Religion,” “Domestic Life,” “Foodways at the Haciendas,” “Viti-Viniculture,” “Production of Botijas” (earthenware amphorae used to contain wine and brandy), “Labor and Aesthetics,” and “PAHN and the Descendant Communities.” Vinyl wall panels offer information and images for each theme, and four cases contain artifacts related to the “Built Environment,” “Domestic Life,” “Production of Botijas,” and “Labor and Aesthetics.”

The first case exhibited three objects relevant to the built environment of the colonial haciendas: a fired brick, an iron nail, and a fragment of a polychrome majolica decorative floor tile. These objects, recovered in excavations at San José, San Javier, and La Ventilla, were common construction materials that comprised the built environment of the hacienda cores and were produced by onsite enslaved specialists. Adobes were prepared along the riverbanks, bricks and tiles were fired in kilns, nails were forged by an enslaved blacksmith, and reeds were harvested from the river and woven by enslaved artisans to provide roofs or walls for simple buildings.

The second case offered a variety of artifacts associated with the domestic life of enslaved households, all of which were found in association with 17th- and 18th-century domestic middens from slave residences. At San Joseph and San Xavier, enslaved married couples were permitted to live independently in simple homes adjacent to the hacienda plaza. Pedestals within the case displayed fragments of glass bottles, sherds from coarse cooking pots, sherds of fine majolica tablewares, a single wooden rosary bead, and two sherds from tobacco-pipe bowls. We interpret the high-quality polychrome majolica as likely purchased in bulk by the Jesuits, and hacienda administrators gifted the wares to enslaved households (Weaver 2018:128). Likewise, rosaries were gifted to the enslaved by the Jesuits at regular intervals and were an evangelical tool that would have numbered among the few personal possessions in an enslaved household at the Nasca estates (Weaver, Muñoz et al. 2019:1017–1018). The clay tobacco pipes, one inscribed with tiny facing triangles, resonated broadly with the emerging Atlantic African diaspora and seem to have been rare items at the Nasca haciendas, perhaps indexing an elevated status of their enslaved owners.

The third case was dedicated to the material culture of botija production by enslaved potters. Three artifacts were selected to illustrate the process of crafting the wheel-thrown amphorae: a nearly complete half-volume botija, or perulera, that collapsed during firing in a kiln at San Xavier, a scoriated brick from an excavated kiln floor, and a güiro—a gourd rasping instrument found in association with the San Joseph kiln complex. The association of a musical instrument with ceramic production suggests that rhythm and music was perhaps important to the potters’ work (Weaver, Muñoz et al. 2019:1017).

The fourth and final case presented artifacts aimed at demonstrating the aesthetics employed by enslaved potters in the production of botijas and botija setters. In contrast to the botijas, which circulated with the hacienda’s produce, the setters remained at the estates as tools to keep the botijas upright, and thus the individuality of each reflects deliberate choices made by each enslaved potter. Two of the exhibited setters have thumb-impressed bases, and the other two bear cord roulette decoration—potentially resonating with Atlantic African aesthetic treatments (Weaver 2021:14). Three large botija sherds were also displayed. Two of these were decorated with wavy, annular, and intersecting combed motifs at the shoulders of the vessels in a style common to the Jesuit haciendas of Nasca, but yet to be identified at other colonial estates. The other botija sherd was painted with a black IHS Jesuit Christogram.

This last display also demonstrated the ways in which botijas were marked to identify their contents and estates of origin. The most common way was to use a specific design stamped into the plaster plug sealing the botija. We displayed a botija mouth with intact plug featuring a stamped floral motif and plaster plug by itself, stamped with a Star of David, both recovered during survey at the site of the Jesuit warehouse at Puerto Caballa. A minority of botijas recovered at the haciendas of Nasca bear stamps on the vessel’s neck, but this was another way of monitoring quality and distinguishing between contents. The case also displayed a botija neck from San Joseph stamped with the Jesuit Christogram and another from La Ventilla bearing a stamped floral design.

The museum’s director, Susana Arce, commented on how different this exhibit is, in that the majority of the artifacts are fragmentary. In Peru, exhibits featuring anything other than pre-Hispanic materials are rare, and ceramics are whole or mostly complete and primarily from funerary contexts (Mesia-Montenegro 2014:218). This contrasts with our display of sherds of common cooking vessels used by enslaved people in their kitchens and small fragments of polychrome majolica. For many museumgoers in Peru these represent something very unusual and cause them to reconsider the role of archaeology in the public discovery of history. Arce reports that, in the first week of the exposition, two clear public favorites emerged among the exhibited artifacts: the San Joseph güiro and a setter sherd. The güiro resonated strongly with visitors, who often remarked that it resembles a whale. A botija-setter sherd with a thumb-impressed motif at its base also captured the public’s imagination. Through this artifact one can contemplate a human connection to the enslaved ceramicist who left his thumbprints in the clay. Additionally, the exhibit made use of quick-response codes linking to 3-D photogrammetric models of many of the artifacts that visitors could manipulate or save to their phones for later viewing.

The opening ceremony was attended by several members of the descendant communities, including the project’s madrinas and a local pisco producer, who brought bottles of his pisco made from grapes grown at San José for a toast. The event included a short presentation by Weaver and a guided tour of the exhibit. Matute offered opening remarks, acknowledging the event as part of the Ministry of Culture’s official commemoration of the 165th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. While the official visitation logs are not available due to the abrupt closure of the museum at the start of the pandemic, museum staff report that the exhibit was well attended by locals as well as national and foreign tourists during the three months prior to the museum closure. Once a month the museum hosts a free Sunday, which includes a number of activities for families. During the February 2020 free event our special exhibit drew over 400 visitors, most of whom were local to the department of Ica. At the end of February, the Ministry of Culture brought a delegation from the United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent to the exhibit. Over the course of the exhibit’s tenure in Ica, PAHN’s public goals were met by inserting south-coast Afro-Peruvian archaeological heritage into broader discourse surrounding social equity and the global African diaspora.

Keeping the Conversation Going: Engaging Multiple Publics through Web Initiatives, 2020

The 2020 international pandemic of COVID-19 challenged and changed the nature of social science and field research in many disciplines worldwide. The 401st anniversary San José patron feast on 19 March 2020 was somber, with a Mass at the chapel otherwise breaking up an evening of neighbors socially distancing in their own homes. The pandemic has also laid bare the legacies of colonialism and racial and economic disparities. By September 2020, Peru had the highest national COVID-19 mortality rate in the world (Johns Hopkins University and Medicine: Coronavirus Resource Center 2020). As in other regions of the Americas, black and brown Peruvians were the hardest hit, especially in rural communities—results of the very colonial legacies PAHN was envisioned to make visible. The Ingenio Valley, a waypoint along the Pan-American Highway, has been particularly impacted by the virus. The inconveniences felt by archaeological projects seem miniscule in contrast to the loss of life and the ruptures within communities. Like all other active archaeological projects worldwide, PAHN had to reconsider fieldwork plans and modify public and community engagement strategies. In this, new opportunities presented themselves. One of the most profound transformations to occur in 2020 was a global change in the way people communicate—not just for academics, but for everyone, taking cultural events online at a scale never seen before (Franklin et al. 2020:7). PAHN launched several Web initiatives designed to maintain engagement with multiple publics simultaneously, connecting with descendant communities in Nasca and Palpa while reaching broader audiences and starting new conversations across Peru.

Before the pandemic, digital approaches to museography and public archaeology through social media and the use of 3-D images proved effective ways of engaging diverse communities regardless of distance (Bonacchi 2017; Williams et al. 2019). However, we recognize that digital objects produced from the artifacts in our collections are the intellectual property of the descendants of those who produced/owned the original material culture. Some members of this diverse descendant community have given us the charge to (1) make the objects accessible, and (2) protect the objects as a restricted form of heritage (Weaver 2020a). Obtaining a free “Pro Cultural Heritage” account with Sketchfab.com allowed our photogrammetric models to be viewed and shared freely on an online platform, but not downloaded or modified. During the pandemic, we began to add more 3-D photogrammetric models of artifacts on display in our exhibit at the Ica museum to PAHN’s online Sketchfab profile. These items can be viewed and manipulated in simulated 3-D space from any device, including smartphones with an Internet connection, making them available to communities in rural Nasca, where most families connect via mobile networks.

Our major public activity in 2020 was the production of a six-part Web series of short videos, launched via Facebook from 24 May through 28 June for the nationally recognized Month of Afro-Peruvian Culture (Fig. 8). The Web series was aimed at continuing the work of our museum exhibit, which was originally meant to travel from Ica to Lima engaging a broader national public in discourse about Afro-Peruvian material culture, history, and heritage. Additionally, it has enabled community participation in our project beyond our traditional face-to-face outreach during the annual research season or at special events in the districts of Changuillo and El Ingenio. Weaver and Santana scripted the Web series together, while Santana narrates the series and brings her experience as a professional archaeologist and an African descendant and a native of the Ingenio Valley. Together, we took the eight themes of the Ica museum exhibit and combined them into six episodes broadly focused on the historical archaeology of slavery at the Jesuit haciendas of Nasca, with episodes on (1) PAHN and the built environment of the haciendas, (2) religion and slavery, (3) domestic life and foodways, (4) vitiviniculture, (5) botija production, and (6) PAHN and the descendant communities. In total we produced about 45 min. of content, aiming for digestible segments ranging between 6 and 9 min. each.

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Web series on PAHN’s Facebook page. (Screen capture by Brendan J. M. Weaver, 2020.)

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By the fourth week of the series, the first four episodes each had an average of 355 views, 396 post interactions, and 87 shares. Some of the comments asked pointed questions about the information or conclusions we presented, which we were able to address directly to the viewers. For example, several viewers in Ica had specific questions about the early colonial distilling practices and viticulture in the Ingenio Valley. We were also able to clarify the types of documents we use in our analysis, our understanding of religious dynamics at the hacienda and of enslaved residents prior to their captivity, and receive ethnoarchaeological commentary vital for future considerations. These comments are an excellent way to gauge public interest in certain themes and avenues of research, and will help guide our future research directions. Of the PAHN Facebook page’s more than 2,900 followers, 73% live in Peru, and while most connect to the Internet through Lima, around 400 are in the departments of Ica or Ayacucho, residing near our project area.

We also believe the Web series to have been effective in our efforts to engage with ongoing conversations about Afro-Peruvian history, culture, and visibility at the national level. Through the Web series, culture reporter Ernesto Carlín became aware of PAHN and authored a full-page article on Afro-Peruvian historical archaeology at the Nasca haciendas for the official state newspaper, El Peruano (Carlín 2020). In furthering our efforts at maintaining a more effective Web presence in the future, PAHN also launched a new bilingual Website, <https://pahnperu.org>. The platform brings together content from the Facebook page, including the Web series, as well as the 3-D models from the Sketchfab page. It is hoped this will aid in the future utility of these resources for the communities of Nasca and Palpa, as well as the broader public.

Final Reflections

As Peru approaches its bicentenary as a republic on 28 July 2021, the work of publicly engaged archaeology becomes increasingly important in order for the country to confront its history and colonial legacies, and for Peruvians to envision their future. Close partnerships between the local communities, national Afro-Peruvian organizations, the regional government, and the Ministry of Culture have allowed us to explore African-diasporic archaeology, history, and knowledge at various scales and with various publics, especially in the contexts of 2019’s important anniversaries. Amidst an unforgiving international pandemic, PAHN Web initiatives, centering on the educational video series, have also allowed us to share our research and, via social media, learn from the local communities and general Peruvian public in ways that we had not yet explored. Over the last year, PAHN’s Web presence was particularly effective in entering national discourse about Afro-Peruvian culture and activist efforts toward increasing visibility of the culture and history of African descendants in Peru. This success has made it clear that we need to develop a sustained Web presence moving forward. However, there is much work yet to be done to engage other stakeholders and to increase the visibility of Afro-Peruvian history and culture, especially from communities beyond the better-known centers of Afro-Peruvian heritage.

In the past two years we have also made important progress in collaborating with the Society of Jesus, especially through the archives and heritage office of the Jesuit Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya. We hope that these relationships and discussions will result in social reconciliation and a renewed dedication to social justice. We are also grateful for the Ministry of Culture’s support of our ongoing research and our public projects. The legacies of the coastal haciendas and African slavery are a heritage shared by all in Peru. Recently, social and academic movements in other countries have begun to question the links between the success of modern institutions and their slave-owning pasts, specifically universities in the United States (Wilder 2013; Harris et al. 2019) and financial institutions in the UK (Hall et al. 2014; Jolly 2020). However, in Peru there has yet to be a social reckoning of the importance of enslaved labor in the development of the country’s most important social, economic, political, and educational institutions. The continuing work of PAHN with its engagement with stakeholders and publics at multiple scales begins to address this.

Our work with our community partners has transformed the development of archaeological narratives for the Afro-Peruvian communities of Nasca and made possible broader Peruvian engagement with African-descendant archaeology in the country. The real work of community partnerships is often done while the archaeologists lend a hand at community-organized faenas and conversations while chopping vegetables and over a meal in a community member’s kitchen. We have learned to listen more than we talk—not only for bits of local knowledge to inform our interpretations, but for the real needs, aspirations, and interests of our partners (Blakey 2020:192). This is a slower way of doing archaeology. Together we seek to continue to disseminate knowledge and generate spaces for critical public reflections about archaeological practice and its commitment to descendant communities and broader publics, even during difficult times.