Steve Kosiba

STEVEN B. KOSIBA, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, was approved funding in April 2018 to aid research on “An Archaeology of Empowerment: Domestic Architecture and Community Formation in an Inca and Spanish Imperial Labor Colony (Cuzco, Peru).” Focusing on the Inka and Spanish Colonial labor colony and quarry of Rumiqolqa (Cusco, Peru), this project found that discrete groups of workers, whom the Inkas had resettled to the site (1400-1533 CE) banded together to redesign their landscape during Spanish Colonial times (1533-1821 CE). The Inkas extracted andesite from Rumiqolqa and nearby quarries to build their capital city’s monumental architecture. Though scholars have long studied Inka architecture and its ideological implications, before this project there had been no investigations of the laborers and artisans who shaped the stones that were essential to the construction of Cusco. Part of a multi-year and interdisciplinary research program, this project employed digital technologies to model Rumiqolqa’s architecture and analyze its domestic spaces. After developing an architectural model of the entire settlement and its environs, project members recorded minute differences in house building practices throughout the colony. Resulting data show that resettled workers at Rumiqolqa maintained physical boundaries between neighborhoods during Inka times. Under Spanish rule, they reshaped the settlement into a self-sufficient community. These findings throw new light on our knowledge of colonialism in the Americas, providing evidence of the strategies by which indigenous people withstood and manipulated colonial conditions of oppression.