Abstract
We use survey data on ancient mining obtained from the upper Ica valley in southern Peru to examine the complex and rich relationships that ancient Andean people maintained with the landscape and the resources it yielded. In particular, we provide a preliminary evaluation of archaeological contexts that illustrate historically and ethnohistorically documented mining practices and attitudes toward the mining landscape. The results of this study indicate that mining in the Andean past was embedded in ontologies where economics, status, ritual responsibilities, and relationships of reciprocity between people and landscape intersected. The archaeological data show that mining of copper and copper-bearing minerals, while practiced for some 2 millennia in the region, became increasingly important and formal in the Late Intermediate Period, when new strategies for the legitimization of inequalities were adopted. These included the ownership and exchange of metal items, the control of their production, and the sponsorship of rituals that accompanied the extraction of minerals from the Andes. Since the mountains have long been understood to be the seat of powerful supernatural beings that interceded in human affairs in ways that depended on human actions, we emphasize that the removal of matter from these mountains was a momentous act, and that palliating its potential consequences was rewarded with great prestige.
Manuscript prepared for the volume Mining and Quarrying in the Ancient Andes: Sociopolitical, Economic and Symbolic Dimensions, Nicholas Tripcevich and Kevin J. Vaughn, editors. 2011.
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Notes
- 1.
Taussig (1980), however, considers the evil personae associated with mines to strictly be a post-conquest phenomenon that incarnated profound changes in mining practices brought about by the Spanish. We may agree that the identity of an evil figure corresponds to notions of European Good/Evil duality (see Brewer 2003; Harris 2000: 23) that may not have existed in the pre-conquest world, where morals, justice, sanctity, and benevolence were contextually fluid and ambiguous notions. In the Prehispanic world, any being could be both good and evil, benevolent or malevolent, at once (Gil and Fernandez 2008: 106). Above all, Andean supernatural beings embodied the potentiality of good and evil that eschewed the sharp Roman Catholic dualism.
- 2.
This observation is somewhat subjective and rests on assumptions about what would constitute a “normal” artifactual surface assemblage on a habitation settlement.
- 3.
This observation was confirmed by Jean-Pierre Protzen (personal communication, 2011) using high-resolution photographs.
- 4.
A few observations about toponymy may shed further light on ancient mines and attitudes on mining and how they are reflected on landscape perceptions. Place-names in the upper Ica valley reflect the ambiguity surrounding mining in traditional Andean cognitive systems. Geographical locations where modern or historical mines have been identified—and presumably where ancient mining would at least have been possible—tend to have names that bear negative or ambiguous connotations, regardless if they are Spanish or Quechua—although we are conscious that we must be careful about assigning such qualitative judgments. Examples of such mountains and quebradas where copper and gold mining has been identified bear such Spanish or Quechua names that translate as “serpent,” “misstep,” “stitches,” or “fate/fortune,” among others. Furthermore, not a single one of those negative or ambiguous connotations was detected in places where there is no mining, further up the valley and in most of the valley’s eastern side, where names are all associated with landforms (“round hill”), ecology (“small branches”), economic activities (“sugar mill”), or names of individuals. Incidentally, it may be warranted to mention that the large quebrada over which Mina Azurita is located is called llancay (where llank’ay = to work, to toil; or alternatively, llankhay = to bother, to devastate). Finally, and this last point is very speculative, a supposedly old mine on the northeastern side of the valley, which we could not survey, is called San Miguel Rescate (“rescue/ransom/redemption/recovery”). This specific Saint or aspect of St. Michael (the rescuer?) is not a generally recognized icon in Latin America or elsewhere. Yet, we feel it is worth noting that in one of the main mining festivals in Oruro, Bolivia, it is the figure of St. Michael that leads the dancing devils in processions as they are publicly ridiculed and cast out of the mines (Harris 2000: 63). Roman Catholic hagiography describes St. Michael alternatively as the archangel that leads God’s armies against Satan’s forces, or as the angel of death who wrestles the souls of the deceased from the devil and carries them to heaven (Holweck 1911). It is tempting to associate this character with the symbolic aspect of mines as extraordinary liminal spaces, gates to the underworld, and the lair of Andean “demons”. It is impossible now to say whether this observed pattern is an attempt at social control, that is to say a way to permanently mark these areas as hazardous in order to keep itinerant miners away from the resource, or if it reflects the mythologically dangerous aspects of mines and mining carried over from the prehispanic era into historic toponymy (Van Gijseghem and Whalen 2012).
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Acknowledgments
We extend gratitude to the National Geographic Society for funding this phase of a wider program initiated by K.J. Vaughn. We are also grateful of the various forms of assistance and support we received from Ruben Gracia Soto and Susana Arce Torres from Ica’s regional Museum and Peru’s Ministry of Culture, and logistic help from Henry Vladimir Falcon. We also thank the anonymous reviewer who took the time to carefully review this early draft of this chapter and offer helpful and valuable suggestions.
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Van Gijseghem, H., Vaughn, K.J., Whalen, V.H., Grados, M.L., Canales, J.O. (2013). Economic, Social, and Ritual Aspects of Copper Mining in Ancient Peru: An Upper Ica Valley Case Study. In: Tripcevich, N., Vaughn, K. (eds) Mining and Quarrying in the Ancient Andes. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5200-3_13
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