The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands
Collapse, Transition, and Transformation
"The scope and depth of the scholarship is the great strength of this book. . . . Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua will be a landmark and enduring contribution to the archaeology and ethnohistory of the colonial Andes."
—Steve Wernke, Vanderbilt University
“Rice’s experience and control of the evidentiary sources lend clarity to Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua, despite its broad, trans-conquest scope. Particularly given the relatively nascent state of Spanish colonial era archaeology in Peru, the breadth and depth of this work make it a must-have reference for regional specialists and key contribution to the literature on the colonization of landscape in the Spanish Americans.”
—Journal of Anthropological Research
"Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua is a once-in-a-lifetime sort of regional study, the kind of product most archaeologists spend a career working towards. Congratulations are due to the author for this sweeping scholarship . . . . any scholar with an interest in the colonization and 're-spatialization' of landscapes will find her discussion of these processes as examined through a detailed case study of importance . . . . for the specialist looking for both raw data and a stimulating and theoretically informed analysis of the impact of colonization on landscape, Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua is a must-read."
—Historical Archaeology
"The book exemplifies the way what seems like fragmentary data can be woven into a larger, more complex story of human environmental and cultural adaptation. . . . [The] depth of the scholarship and the historical scope of the book are a stunning accomplishment. Ultimately, archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and art historians will find this substantive study illuminating."
—Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society
In this rich study of the construction and reconstruction of a colonized landscape, Prudence M. Rice takes an implicit political ecology approach in exploring encounters of colonization in Moquegua, a small valley of southern Peru. Building on theories of spatiality, spatialization, and place, she examines how politically mediated human interaction transformed the physical landscape, the people who inhabited it, and the resources and goods produced in this area.
Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua looks at the encounters between existing populations and newcomers from successive waves of colonization, from Indigenous, expansion states (Wari, Tiwanaku, and Inka) to the foreign Spaniards, and the way each group "re-spatialized" the landscape according to its own political and economic ends. Viewing these spatializations from political, economic, and religious perspectives, Rice considers both the ideological and material occurrences.
Concluding with a special focus on the multiple space-time considerations involved in Spanish-inspired ceramics from the region, Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua integrates the local and rural with the global and urban in analyzing the events and processes of colonialism. It is a vital contribution to the literature of Andean studies and will appeal to students and scholars of archaeology, historical archaeology, history, ethnohistory, and globalization.
