Biography:
Henry Bacha is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. An archaeologist and historical anthropologist with research interests centered in late pre-Hispanic and early colonial Andean South America, he is broadly interested in the relationship between Andean communities, landscapes, and the development of social and political power in the Inka and Spanish colonial empires. His interdisciplinary work incorporates methods and sources derived from landscape archaeology and social and environmental history to explore longue durée histories of human-environment interaction and colonialism. His dissertation project endeavors to engage these themes in the particular context of the Pampas River basin, located in the southern highlands of Peru—a region shaped by successive imperial programs of population resettlement under Inka and Spanish rule. Additional intellectual interests include histories of human-animal relations in the Andes, the history of the the curacazgo under colonial rule, and peasant lifeworlds in the Andes and beyond. Henry holds a B.A. in Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies, also from the University of Chicago, and has archaeological field experience in Peru, Spain, Colombia, and the United States.  

Project Title: Resettled Landscapes: Mitmaqkuna, Reducción, and the Negotiation of Empire in the Pampas River Valley (Ayacucho, Peru), A.D. 1400-1750

Abstract:

This project investigates, utilizing historical and archaeological methods, the accumulative legacies of successive Inka and Spanish imperial programs of population movement and resettlement in the greater Pampas River basin (central Ayacucho, Peru). Historical sources dating to the mid-sixteenth century describe this region as being almost entirely inhabited by the descendants of mitmaqkuna, populations resettled from different Andean regions as a tool of imperial statecraft following Inka incorporation. Recent research indicates that this region of the colonial Viceroyalty of Peru also constituted a heartland of the resettlement program pursued by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo beginning in the 1570s, featuring one of the greatest concentrations of newly established reducciones in the Andes. Adopting a “transconquest” historical perspective, this project interrogates the affective and material influences exerted by prior histories of Inka resettlement over the formation of early colonial society in the Andes. Examining the long-term historical legacies of Inka and Spanish colonial programs of population resettlement, and centering the political stakes of settlement patterns, mobility, and practices of land use in the Pampas River basin, this project ultimately proposes to explore how history and social memory, embedded within Andean landscapes, converged to constitute the terrain of political contestation in colonial Peru.