Peru’s early colonial history is generally viewed from the perspective of the Europeans who invaded the region and documented their conquests. Recent archaeological studies, however, are revealing new insights into the experiences of Indigenous and other peoples who lived during this turbulent period. Archaeologist Jeffrey Quilter discusses findings of the first in-depth archaeological and historical study of a colonial Peruvian town documented in his new book, Magdalena de Cao (Peabody Museum Press, 2021) highlighting how they are advancing our understanding of encounters between Spaniards, Andeans, and others. Discoveries at Magdalena de Cao include everyday clothing, Chinese porcelains, playing cards, a letter written in a lost language, and the earliest human remains of an enslaved African in South America.
Please note that this program features images of human skeletal remains.
Recorded February 4, 2021
About the Speaker
Jeffrey Quilter served as Director of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology from 2012 to 2019. He was also Director of Pre-Columbian Studies and Curator of the Pre-Columbian Collection at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. (1995–2005) and a professor at Ripon College, Wisconsin (1980–1995). His archaeological research has focused mostly on Peru and Costa Rica. He has written six books, including Magdalena de Cao, and edited twelve.
Related
See the related research, Magdalena de Cao.
Transcript
[00:00:08.81] Good evening. My name is Jane Pickering, and I am director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. I'm delighted to welcome you to tonight's program sponsored by the Peabody Museum and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. This is the first event of our online spring series, so I invite you to visit our website at hmsc.harvard.edu to learn about the many exciting programs we have this semester.
[00:00:38.93] Tonight, Jeff Quilter will discuss findings of the first in-depth archaeological and historical study of a colonial Peruvian town documented in his new book, Magdalena de Cao, from the Peabody Museum Press. But before I introduce Jeff, I would like to thank the many participants who contributed to this event via our new pay-as-you-wish program. We really appreciate your support. Thank you.
[00:01:08.45] It is always a great pleasure to introduce my colleague and predecessor, Jeff Quilter, especially tonight as we celebrate the publication of the superb new volume on the work he has led for many years at Magdalena de Cao. In fact, reading it, I'm trying to imagine how he managed to undertake it all while doing his day jobs.
[00:01:30.89] Jeff was director of the Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology from 2012 to 2019. Prior to that, from 1995 to 2005, he was director of pre-Columbian studies and curator of the pre-Columbian collection at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, and before that, a professor at Ripon College in Wisconsin. His archaeological research is focused mostly on Peru and Costa Rica, and he written six books, including this one, and edited 12.
[00:02:05.33] I wanted to keep this introduction short as we should spend our Zoom time listening to Jeff and hopefully having an opportunity for questions, but I do want to say that I consider him a terrific colleague who demonstrates a deep love for both archaeology and museums and to warn you that his easygoing and self-deprecating manner can hide the fact that he is a tremendous scholar. And this book details the remarkable research and accomplishments he has spearheaded for many years. So please join me now in welcoming Jeff Quilter.
[00:02:44.06] Well, thank you very much, Jane. It's a pleasure to be here and to have a chance to discuss and share work that was done by a huge number of people to whom I am extremely grateful, including many students and colleagues at Harvard University, many other universities, as well as my dear colleagues in Peru.
[00:03:11.09] [SPEAKING SPANISH]
[00:03:24.78] And so without any further ado, let's get onto the topic tonight. Warning for those who are concerned about such matters, this is a book launch, and so I want to begin by thanking two people who are essential to produce this book. And one is the person you've just seen, Jane Pickering, who, as director of the Peabody Museum, was very gracious in helping us with spending a bit more money at the very last moments to get some of the images right. We had an issue with some of the images at the last moment, and she generously contributed some money to help fix that problem.
[00:04:13.46] And especially to Kate O'Donnell, with whom I've worked for many, many years now, director of the Peabody Museum Press, thank you, Kate, so much. You put up with a lot with me, and I'm really thankful for this amazingly beautiful book.
[00:04:33.11] And I want to also add my thanks to Diana Munn Xochitl and Chloe Lin for their wonderful technical aid prior to and immediately before this presentation, so thank you all so much. And I have many thanks for all the people who collaborated in this amazing project throughout the years.
[00:04:54.65] And as a book launch, I want to note that anybody who buys three copies and with proof of purchase-- I will be willing to lecture on any topic whatsoever except for electrical engineering and the history of table tennis with proof of purchase of three copies of this book, so keep that in mind.
[00:05:20.49] Lately in our world, we have been dealing with issues of how we understand the past and dealing with topics that are painful and difficult about that past, about civil wars. Well, of course, we're dealing with the problems of pandemics currently. Otherwise, I'd be doing this live in a lecture hall at Harvard University. We are dealing with tyrants of various kinds. We're dealing with colonialism and imperialism and lots of other isms. And so this research, this investigation of the colonial period and the conquest period in Peru, while it may seem very abstract in many ways, is actually quite relevant today.
[00:06:22.71] And I think it bears keeping in mind that, at one time, not that long ago, the idea of the conquest of the new world was seen as a great adventure. It was seen as a positive thing by many, many people. I remember I almost tried to find the images of Victor Mature starring in Captain from Castile about the conquest of Mexico. And of course, times change. Attitudes change about that conquest.
[00:07:01.50] And we are in a period, I think, of extreme revaluing of these issues. And in these times, I think, especially in these recent times of the pandemic and the stress of all of the events of the last year or so, we've come to issues of right and wrong, of good and bad, of people with white hats and people with black hats.
[00:07:31.65] And it's interesting that while there was, even in the 16th century, this narrative of the glory, if you will, of God, gold, and glory of the conquest of the Americas, there was also a counternarrative at the same time. And that was called the Black Legend, although these opposing views were also based in European geopolitics in which the Catholic countries of basically the southern Europe were all for God, gold, and glory, and the Protestant countries of northern Europe were for the Black Legend, which is the depredations and bad things that the Spanish did in the new world.
[00:08:16.32] But as people in universities, as scholars, what we attempt to do is try to understand these things and because by understanding them and realizing that the world is a complex place. And oftentimes, it's not a question of simply good, all good, and all bad. People were acting in the past on very different motives in very different ways, and trying to understand those may help us to understand ourselves, maybe not directly on a one-to-one basis, but certainly indirectly by better appreciating these complex times in the past-- might help us to understand our own complex times.
[00:09:00.61] And the place in question for tonight is this area of the coast of Peru-- oops, sorry-- the north coast of Peru in that Chicama Valley, a larger region than the north coast, which is famous in history for a very long, deep past, a past that included major cultures from the preceramic period. Tom Dillehay at Vanderbilt University recently has identified occupations in the Chicama Valley right near where I work, right near where we're going to look tonight, that go back to at least 12,000 BC all the way to the present time. And these great cultures had a major impact on local people over the centuries, over the millennia, and they were completely independent of what was going on farther south on the highlands of Peru in which the Inca culture eventually, around 1450, rose to power and started to conquer the rest of Peru.
[00:10:21.49] So as one example-- and perhaps the most spectacular example of these Late Prehistoric cultures is Chan Chan, the huge city of the Chimú culture around modern-day Trujillo in the Moche Valley, just south of where we're going to be tonight, that produced this spectacular city with thousands of residents and vast compounds built to house the living and the dead kings of the Chimú culture. These existed as the end product of these 12,000 or 14,000 years of cultural developments on the north coast of Peru.
[00:11:07.48] And it was only in very late prehistory, just before the arrival of Europeans, that the Chimú were conquered by the Incas down here in the southern highlands of Peru in Cusco shortly before the arrival of the Spanish, maybe a hundred years or so. So we're dealing with a region, the north coast of Peru, which, in many ways, was on a cultural trajectory completely different than the rest of Peru, interrelated, certainly, but nevertheless rather independent.
[00:11:44.20] And it was this very late conquest of the region by the Inca that led to some of the complexities we see that carried through into the period of the Spanish arrival. And it was in Cajamarca that Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador, led his troops from first capturing the king by surprise, using a technique that he learned from Cortés in Mexico, and holding him prisoner for ransom for a year as the ransom was fulfilled and then, on trumped-up charges, executing him and then marching his army-- a growing army grown by Indian allies who resisted the Inca conquest, including, very likely, people from our region in the Chicama Valley-- down to Cusco where they laid siege to the capital city and eventually conquered the Inca, at least the Inca capital.
[00:13:00.28] And this is an important point because one of the things that the experts in the audience will certainly know, but many of the other people may not-- the conquest of Peru was not a simple event that transpired over a year or two. It was actually a very long, drawn-out process, and that is part of what makes the story we're going to get to in a few minutes more interesting because it was not a simple conquest and then a capitulation by Indigenous peoples.
[00:13:33.79] Rather, it was a series of events starting with Atahualpa and Pizarro in November 1532 in the highland town of Cajamarca where Pizarro surprised and captured the Inca emperor, then held him for ransom for about a year as the ransom was paid, then, unfortunately for him, executing him in the plaza of the Cajamarca town and then marching that army down to Cusco and fighting to take the city and then, however, a long period of time in which the Spanish started fighting one another over the spoils, if you will, of a war. And it was only in 1571, three or four, depending on how you count it, four decades after the arrival of Pizarro, that the fifth Viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, arrived and established a relative order to this chaotic situation.
[00:14:56.49] My good colleague, Karen Spaulding, has described this period, this 40-year period from the arrival of Pizarro to Toledo, as a plunder economy. It was based simply on sacking as much of the gold and the silver and the resources of Peru and sending it back to Spain as simply as possible. And if you read biographies of Toledo from earlier days, like the 1930s, Toledo is actually considered a hero by some people because he did establish an order, but the order he established was a strict and harsh one on Indigenous people.
[00:15:40.70] So we may not appreciate him as much today as people have in the past, but nevertheless, he did establish a kind of order. And that order was partly based upon emphasizing the establishment of communities of Indigenous people that were brought from their rural settlements into centralized places controlled by the Spanish, basically, a form of concentration camp.
[00:16:15.38] But that's a simple way to refer to it because, well, they weren't as severe as the concentration camps we know of from 60 years ago, but they were nevertheless an enforced settlement of native peoples. And these things are known as [SPANISH] or [SPANISH] singular, reduction in the sense of like a cook who reduces a sauce to a more concentrated form. And those [SPANISH] went on to become the established towns, many of which are still occupied today.
[00:16:56.55] Now, the place in question that we're interested in is in the Chicama Valley, the large valley just north of the smaller valley of the Moche Valley where the culture of great fame is located and where the city of Trujillo, one of currently the largest cities on the north coast of Peru, named after Pizarro's hometown in Spain, is located. And in this larger valley just to its north-- Chicama-- there is a very interesting geological phenomenon, a raised platform, if you will, a raised terrace of Earth that is called the El Brujo Archaeological Complex.
[00:17:44.79] And it's called that because it is chock-a-block filled with archaeological sites from its tip at its southern end, as you can see down here on the left on the bottom, at Huaca Prieta, that site that has been identified as having this extremely early occupation, all the way up to other mounds that were former Moche temples and other temples that were occupied and then abandoned over these thousands and thousands of years. As a matter of fact, we could argue that the El Brujo terrace is probably one of the longest continually occupied places in the new world that we can identify. There are, of course, many, many others, but that are sort of obvious there.
[00:18:35.10] And over here on the right, we're looking at that Chicama Valley from the west eastwards, and notice there are two Magdalenas. Isn't that curious, a town called Magdalena? One is modern Magdalena, and the other one is Magdalena at El Brujo, located right up here in the-- it says [SPANISH] just north of this Huaca Cao Viejo. And that is the subject of our particular attention tonight.
[00:19:09.57] Now, it turns out, here we are, looking at that upraised terrace about 8 meters above the surrounding valley floor on the right and then right next to the Pacific Ocean, the beach on the left. We're at the tip standing on Huaca Prieta looking north, and in the distance, we see a huaca over here called Huaca Cortada. "Huaca" is the term commonly used as an ancient ruin on the north coast these days.
[00:19:37.71] And then another one over here on the right-- and that is the Huaca Cao Viejo, on the other side of which is this Magdalena El Brujo. And it turns out that this is not the first Magdalena. The first Magdalena was somewhere else. We do not know where.
[00:20:00.79] But we do know that in 1578, there was an El Niño event. I think most people know what El Niño is now. It's interesting because 30 years ago or even 20 years ago, people didn't know what El Niño was. But it's an inversion of the cold-water Humboldt current in the Pacific that produces intense rainfall on the coast where it normally doesn't occur and droughts in the highlands.
[00:20:25.99] And in 1578, there was a massive El Niño all along the North coast of Peru, and as you can see here from the quote, subsequent to the 1578 El Niño, there was a report made by a commission that came from Lima to examine what had occurred. And they reported that at the time of these rains, the town of Cao was abandoned by its residents because of fear of the flood, and they moved to a high place where their ancestors had lived. And that is the El Brujo terrace.
[00:21:04.94] Now, it's interesting because many archaeologists-- often the earliest things are the ones least known, and the latest things are well known. In this case, it's somewhat the opposite. There's no other place in the valley that matches the description of this high place where these people from the first Magdalena moved, the first [SPANISH] that had been actually established before Toledo. They moved as the flood occurred and resettled. So we know that it was at El Brujo.
[00:21:41.61] This is what it looks like today. If you look to the right, you see a large mound. It looks sort of like a hill. That hill is actually the ruins of an ancient Moche or Mochica temple that was occupied between about 300 AD probably to about 800 or so, then abandoned, maybe dismantled and occupied no more except for occasional burials by local people in the rubble of the old ruin. And then this rise to the left just above the heads of these people is a mound. That is the ruins of the plaza of the temple that later became the place where the Magdalena refugees built a new church.
[00:22:43.17] Here's an aerial view thanks to Google, and we can see, here is the temple, the Huaca Cao Viejo. "Cao" probably means "valley" in a language we simply don't know much about anymore. Here's the plaza, the old plaza of that temple, and here is the outlines of the church.
[00:23:08.98] And below this sort of washboard effect that you see on the map is actually the remains of streets, and in the raised parts are these houses or the remains of houses of this colonial town. So Magdalena de Cao 2 is at El Brujo, and it is this refugee community of a [SPANISH] that fled because of the flood.
[00:23:37.75] Here's another view that helps clarify things we're now looking at the huaca. This has taken an earlier time before that beautiful new awning was placed over the plaza area of the mound, and here is that rise. It's raised partly because of the use of the plaza being built up over layers over time and then eventually a church placed on it.
[00:24:04.24] If you stand on top of that huaca-- whoops, sorry, let's go back for a minute. If you stand on top of that huaca and look out, you will see, down here on the right, the remains the nave of the church. This is how it looked when we first investigated it.
[00:24:18.55] This is a view from the nave, looking at the huaca, and this is the outer corner of that plaza. We're not even sure whether this decoration, this mural is Moche or it's colonial, but that framework of that plaza was used by the colonial people when they eventually were able to recover from the flood to establish their church complex.
[00:24:49.18] And here is a view of that. So here's another view of a map, and here, we have the church. Here is an atrium or gathering place in front of the church. There's actually a lot more of architecture that has not been quite filled in here.
[00:25:03.97] And here is a large plaza in the middle of the town, and these red lines represent different wall fragments that we were able to identify. And we did intensive excavations at two units that are actually house compounds that look something like what you can see on the lower right from an aerial point of view. And these were built of quincha. "Quincha" is a local word for "wattle and daub," so it's basically sticks interwoven with a mud plaster, which was a later or poorer production in relationship to earlier constructions which were done of adobe by the people who eventually reconstituted themselves in Magdalena.
[00:25:56.95] Here's an excavation of the church, and what we're seeing here is one of the major walls on each side. And it probably looks something like one of these. This is the church-- oops, sorry-- church in modern Magdalena. Our bell tower was probably not three dimensional. It was probably just a slab of large wall with holes in the top for the bells. On the upper left-hand corner is the ruins of the church of the Dominican friars who were based in the town of Chicama in the valley and who sent missionaries and priests and friars to occupy and preach and serve the community in Magdalena.
[00:26:53.16] This is an excavation shot, aerial shot of the church with north being at our right-hand side, and you notice there's a baptistery at the top for baptizing the converts. There is a sacristy in the lower left close to where the altar would have been, although we didn't actually find an altar. It may have been portable or probably was a portable table because we found no foundations of an actual construction made of these adobe or mud bricks. But the sacristy would be where the priests would change his clothing in preparation for the services.
[00:27:33.72] And then in the lower bottom of the screen, we see a kitchen hearth; a grinding station; a room with a bench, which may have been a classroom; ovens; a complete set-up for not only taking care of the friars who lived in this area but also probably to feed and take care of at least some of the people who lived in the town just to the north, to the right of our view here. Also, as you see, just near the entrance of the nave-- oops, sorry-- near the entrance of the nave, we have-- sorry for this. We have subfloor burials. Now we're going to see some of these human remains, so if anyone's worried about this, it's time to look away or do something else.
[00:28:33.54] Now we're seeing the same church with the nose or front of the church down at the bottom and north basically at the top of the screen. There was a large looters' pit but unfortunately, the site has been intensively looted by all sorts of local people over the years, starting probably as early as the 16th century. And so we discovered these remains. We didn't actually go looking for them so much as we just found them as we cleaned out some of these looter holes, and we felt responsible that we needed to take care of these by excavating them.
[00:29:11.32] And we found the remains of individuals who were buried in basically a Christian style, laid on their back in the supine position with things like not many burial goods, but one had a little blue glass bead, very early blue glass bead that indicated it was a relatively early colonial burial. And thanks to a team of archaeologists and bioarchaeologists, we did intensive investigations of these remains.
[00:29:54.57] And we also found one example of a woman buried in a somewhat traditional style on the edge of the atrium outside of the church and outside of an area that we suspected was the town burial for those who weren't elites. The Indigenous elite people seem to have been buried in the church underneath the floor. The townspeople who were christianized were buried in the town cemetery outside but next to the nave, and this woman was buried in a not totally traditional style but outside of the cemetery, probably someone who had not converted, buried with her textile kit, as you can see on the bottom.
[00:30:46.00] So we have lots of different kinds of reactions and relations to the presence of the Spaniards and their traditions at the town. And this is one of the big takeaways of tonight's talk, that what we see at Magdalena is different reactions to the changes that were occurring, these dramatic changes that were occurring in Peru as a result of the arrival of the Spaniards. In 1578, they had been through 40 years of turmoil, pandemics, corrupt rulers-- sound familiar-- incompetent rulers, population movements, extremely hard time. And by 1578, people were starting to accommodate themselves. Some were, at least, and others were still resisting this new way of doing things.
[00:31:53.07] Perhaps one of the most profound and moving remains is this skull. You're just seeing two different views of it. It's actually a cranium. Since it doesn't have its jaw, it's a cranium.
[00:32:07.95] It was found loose on the top of the ground. We found many, many human bones just scattered on the surface of the ground because of previous looting. And our bioarchaeologist, Cathy Gaither, did some initial analyses, and she came to a conclusion that this cranium did not fit the criteria that it was an Indigenous Andean person. Nor was it a European, but rather, it had characteristics of being an African.
[00:32:45.98] So the most intense analysis of anything, any object, any material we found at the site was devoted to this cranium as you can see by all the people at the bottom of the screen who were involved in this work. And through this amazing team's efforts of specialists and DNA specialists and bone chemistry specialists and Cathy in particular in the statistical analysis of these remains, we were able to identify that this person was probably a West African.
[00:33:23.27] He was a male. He had a light build, a gracile build, so much so that at first, we thought this person may have been female, but thanks to the DNA, we determined it was male and that this person had suffered trauma during life and that early in his life, he had a non-Andean diet, but that later in his life, he had an Andean diet, that is to say, things like maize and manioc and food items that were not found in Africa or in Europe at the time.
[00:34:09.17] And it's thanks to this team and thanks to the kinds of analyses we can do on human remains these days that we're able to basically bring this person's story back to life. It's not a full story. Many things are missing. We think it highly likely that he was probably a slave, but he was probably also probably a house servant given his gracile build. He would not have been fit for strong, hard labor although perhaps he was put to it anyhow, because he died in his 20s.
[00:34:51.05] And that raises the whole question of, how did these people at this town in this town relate to these changes? One of the great things that is discussed about the arrival of Europeans in the new world all the way from Canada to Patagonia is what's sometimes called the Columbian Exchange, the great exchange of food items, enriching the diets both of the old world and the new world through the exchange of foods and plants that normally hadn't been available previously.
[00:35:23.87] We were lucky enough to find this amazing kitchen area with these vessels sunk in the mud floor of this house with gourd bowls still in place as coverings and, in a couple of cases, rags also covering the vessels and inside, the powdered remains of the foods that they had once held-- they were still holding, in a way. And we conducted an analysis, and thanks to our team at ARQUEOBIOS at the University of Trujillo in Trujillo, of course.
[00:36:02.87] And amazingly, the diet was actually a very simple diet, but one that represents a very traditional Andean diet. It has basically manioc. Huge importance of manioc-- we're finding that throughout Peru, both in ancient times as well as in colonial times, much more important than we previously thought, partly because previously, manioc doesn't preserve very well as a large remains. It's only through its starch and grains that we can discover it, but it's all over the place throughout Peru and throughout prehistory on the coast. Also some maize, potato-- of course, a traditional Andean food-- and then clams and fish as the main diet of the people who lived in this particular house, house 28.
[00:36:58.54] We also did bone chemistry. Here's a comparison of different groups of people beyond just the town of Magdalena. These blue diamonds represent the Magdalena people who were buried in the church, the ones that were underneath the floors of the church. They were probably elite Indigenous people in the community, and if you look at this chart, the farther to the right you go, the more meat you had. This is not distinguishing between fish or other kinds of meat.
[00:37:34.24] And the farther up you go, the more you are dealing with-- sorry, the other way. The further up you go, the more you're dealing with meat, and the farther to the right you go, the more you're dealing with maize. And here is our cluster of Magdalena people.
[00:37:55.97] But look where our African is, way out in left field, literally, with a very, very different diet. This is a sort of generalized estimation of his diet, probably representing both his later Andean diet and his earlier non-Western, non-Andean diet.
[00:38:24.21] Amazingly, we found a huge number of plants that were introduced later in history. Wheat, for example-- definitely an Old World crop. Things like banana-- also an Old World crop-- olives, hickory, so that this is the later occupation of Magdalena-- radically changed. We don't know where these things were being grown, probably off the terrace down in the valley below the main occupation area.
[00:39:01.88] And we found a huge range of artifacts of all sorts of kinds, which I am going to rather quickly go through since we're running out of time here, running a little late. We found coins, and again, an example of how this tiny little community, really sort of out in the middle of nowhere compared to so many other places in 16th- and 17th-century Peru, was nevertheless pulled into this global Spanish empire so that they had coins. We didn't find many of them, partly because they are so valuable. But we did find two.
[00:39:46.60] They still, at the same time, in contrast, were using Indigenous pottery although some of the styles, like this little jug in the middle, may have been influenced by European styles. They found they had ceramics that were made to imitate Asian porcelains because Asian porcelains, throughout Europe and the New World, were the most desired ceramic. And the people of China and Japan kept the secret of how to make porcelain for a very long period of time, so Europeans had to make basically poor imitations of them.
[00:40:33.40] And so, too, at the same time, again, in another contrast of how these different forces were working both to try and maintain traditional practices, to accept new materials and new ideas, or sometimes to create entirely new inventions, here is the case of, on the left, a traditional Chimú Inca-style double-spout-and-bridge bottle of polished earthenware. And then here on the right-- these are both museum examples-- the same kind of vessel, but coated in what my colleague, Parker VanValkenburgh, calls EGG ware-- Early Green Glazed ware-- which is clearly a colonial, more local production rather than an importation of a pseudo-porcelain glazed earthenware like we saw in the previous slide.
[00:41:35.08] We didn't find a lot of this. We found of just a few fragments, including this little finial that is very similar to the ones you see here, but nevertheless, we know it's present.
[00:41:47.89] Beads-- again, the place to get beads in 16th-century and 17th-century world was Venice and its neighboring islands as well as Spain. We have a magnificent study in our book by Alexander Menaker, who was able to demonstrate that these beads were being imported and loved by the Magdalena people, yet at the same time, down here in the lower right, we see beads made of this traditional red-shelled spondylus shell, which remained important to local people as their ancestors had appreciated despite the fact that glass beads were also attractive.
[00:42:35.96] We have a metal study including, again, another case where traditional people, local people had been making spectacular metal objects of gold, of silver, of copper for centuries on the north coast of Peru. As a matter of fact, about 200 years before the arrival of the Incas, the level of metal production by Indigenous people in the north coast of Peru was reaching a sort of proto-industrial level for tools and weapons as well as for ornaments.
[00:43:12.92] But nevertheless, there were new ideas introduced by Europeans, including this rather spectacular folding knife, one of the real special objects we found, partly because it's so ornamented with this beautiful carving in that very sort of 17th-century style. And it even has the initials of the maker or the owner on it.
[00:43:41.28] At the same time, we also have objects, and at some point, we're going to post these online and ask for crowdsourcing to identify them. We have various metal objects of unknown use, such as this particular peculiar object, which is probably part of a composite tool of some sort. Is it like a little box to put money in, and you press it to-- as someone's entering the subway? No subways there, of course.
[00:44:11.46] And we have pins, and one of the things I learned-- it's been a fascinating project to investigate pins because it turns out that pins were essential clothing items in 16th- and 17th-century worlds. In Europe, sometimes hundreds of thousands of pins are found in 16th- and 17th-century sites because they were used to hold up clothing. This is in a day before elastic. To keep those waistbands up-- you know that COVID 15? You've got to have those waistbands.
[00:44:52.95] And they didn't have zippers. They were just invented inventing buttons, so pins basically literally pinned you together. And we had them imported all the way from Spain into Europe, and if you want an object that most represents the introduction of the modern world into anywhere, it's pins. It was one of the main things that Adam Smith talked about in The Wealth of Nations, how pins were one of the first things that were manufactured by machines.
[00:45:28.44] We have textiles, and this is all because of this amazing preservation due to this dry desert in which we're working, thanks to Conservatives Without Borders represented here. You did an amazing job of helping to conserve some of our textiles early in the project, and to Carrie Brezine, Harvard PhD student, who did a wonderful study showing how we have preserved textiles which represent Indigenous styles, yet using some European techniques, as you see on the left. We have textiles using Indigenous techniques in quasi-traditional styles.
[00:46:11.58] And we have two entirely new styles as well as European styles, such as this large fragment of a textile on the far right, which is probably a burial shroud that was painted. The painted textiles are a long-standing coastal Andean tradition, and yet the motifs in this textile seemed that they may have had some European influence, such as the crosses or these sort of M motifs, although it's very hard to say because there were techniques that were certainly shared or motifs that were shared despite the differences in cultures.
[00:46:58.83] We also have other examples of varying responses to European ways and goods within the same community by our excavations in two different houses, unit 1 and unit 2. Unit 1 seems to have been rich and devoutly Christian as shown by not only things like a metal crucifix that was found on the floor of the house but also one carved in wood, one that was clearly done by somebody living at the site rather than an imported item that might have been appreciated for reasons other than strict religiosity. And yet unit 2 had very much fewer examples of Christian items or even things like metal that was imported from Europe.
[00:47:56.50] And then we have paper. Interestingly, I started this project to try and get away from paper, that is to say, to get away from documents and try and understand the lived experience of what it was like to be in the early colonial period. But because of this amazing preservation of the desert, we have this preserved paper, and we have it in quantity. And so we didn't refuse it at all. We were very, very happy to discover this.
[00:48:30.35] And why paper was at the site is probably due to the church collapse. We don't know when the church collapsed. Interestingly, as I said before, the later we get in history, the less we kind of know about what happened at the site.
[00:48:45.20] There was a huge earthquake on the north coast of Peru in 1619, and we know that by the 1700s, the town had been continuing with the absence of a church because there was a town alcalde-- mayor-- who went to Spain and complained that their church was in ruins. And the local priest had used money that was given to fix the church for his own mill, his own probably sugarcane mill, and that they needed more money. He actually wasn't the town mayor. He was a district chief of a much larger region.
[00:49:36.48] These papers range from everything from printed documents to fragments of prints of religious events to handwritten notes to musical scores, both printed musical scores and handwritten ones, and playing cards. Some of the most notable ones include a document that actually recounts its address to the Reverend Preacher Garcia de Haro, who was a curate-- in other words, in charge-- of the doctrina. That was the word for the church presence at Magdalena de Cao. Notice that Magdalena de Cao is actually abbreviated here, Magda de Cao, and so forth and so on.
[00:50:29.04] We also have this amazing letter that's actually already been published in a separate volume, the American Anthropologist. This is a rather mundane letter-- it's the only complete letter, too, that we have. Most of the papers we have are fragments-- in which a servant of a priest says that he went to try and buy some cloth, and he couldn't do it because the guy wanted too much money. So what should he do?
[00:51:00.83] But the priest got the note. We don't know how he answered him, but on the back of the note, he wrote down a series of numbers with words next to them. And those words are in a language-- well, we don't know what the language is. There is a lost language on the north coast of Peru called Quingnam, and this may be Quingnam. But we don't know for sure because we have no comparisons whatsoever.
[00:51:28.35] And we have very contrasting items of paper as well as everything else. So on the left, you see a fragment-- we have many, many fragments-- of a printed indulgence from a 1089 indulgence issued by Pope Urban. An indulgence was, of course, a document you could buy that would release you from time in purgatory before you could get into heaven, and the money paid for this indulgence was to free the Holy Land from Muslim domination.
[00:52:08.25] So the people in Magdalena, what did they know of the Holy Land and Muslim domination? Well, I guess they were told to some degree, but they were left basically-- they were probably forced or coerced to pay for the indulgences.
[00:52:25.38] But once the church collapsed, what do they do with the paper? Well they turned it into cut-outs, and they rolled it up into cigarettes. Every archaeologist likes to find the earliest something. I found the earliest cigarette butts. So the reaction of native people to the printed word sometimes is described by some people as profound and puzzling, but by the time the Magdalena people got to it, they used it for fun like cutting out a butterfly.
[00:53:04.70] We have playing cards. When Pizarro was heading towards Cusco, he was writing back to Spain, asking for dice and playing cards because his group wanted to gamble.
[00:53:22.58] And we have gourds which represent both traditional styles of carving as well as Indigenous styles of carving and hybrid styles of carving, again, showing this rich mix of different cultures coming into being in relationship to one another. This one is one of my most striking ones because it shows this man or woman interacting with a puma or some kind of cat up in the tree. Is it a myth? We don't know.
[00:54:02.81] And Magdalena, finally in the 1700s, falls apart. It falls apart because of the lack of water. Rocío Delibes, our historian, found this document that shows that irrigation system on the north coast of Peru, down here, written upside down because the way the whole document was produced, but here, right side up. Pueblo de Cao was the last on the irrigation system to receive water.
[00:54:33.98] In pre-Columbian times, the towns and communities farthest from the source of the water were the first to get irrigated, and then they went back upstream. But by the time of the Spanish domination, they stopped all the water off upstream.
[00:54:52.89] And eventually the entire region became dominated with sugarcane. This is how it looks today, massive amounts of sugarcane being produced for the sweet tooths.
[00:55:05.78] And eventually, sometime in the 1700s, the town is abandoned and moved from the Brujo location to its current location in Magdalena de Cao. We know this partly from looking at maps. This is a map from about the 1760s. It shows Magdalena de Cao right at the water's edge.
[00:55:32.85] This is from the mid-1770s, and Cao is now shown inland. Now, again, we have to take this with some grain of salt, but it looks like it was sometime between the 1760s and the late 1770s that the town finally relocated partly because of lack of water, partly because of new opportunities in towns because the 1770s were a bit of a revival of prosperity in the region. We have many more things to discuss, many more things to study such as sandals and shoes and socks.
[00:56:10.50] And I want to thank our crew-- this is the 2007 crew-- and the many institutions that helped fund this project as well as many of our colleagues. There's way too many to mention, which is why you have to buy the book. Thanks particularly to Elio and Margarita, the people who took care of us while we were doing our work.
[00:56:37.85] And I urge you all to buy as many copies of the book as you possibly can and share it with your friends. Here are some information, and I will end there. Thank you. Happy to discuss.
[00:56:57.28] Jeff, thank you so much. I'm not going to be able to forget the earliest cigarette butts, I'm afraid, so I will try and not remember that being the sole thing that I remember. It was a wonderful talk and just really loved all those images. So we have lots of questions, and I'm not sure-- I apologize in advance. We won't be able to get to them all, I suspect.
[00:57:25.42] I would say, if you don't mind, if anyone wants to write to me, I didn't put my email address down, but it's quilter@fas.harvard.edu. I'd be happy to answer questions through emails if you don't get to them tonight.
[00:57:42.29] Great. Thanks, Jeff. And also, you can see, we are offering a 20% discount on the book. So you can see some information there on your screen at the moment.
[00:57:54.49] So starting with a few of the questions, I'm going to try and pull them together from different parts of your talk. So the first three are from your discussion of the human remains, and so a question about the looter pits. And do you think the human remains were moved, and they were not in their original graves? A question about the racial background of people buried in the church, and then a question about, what is the technique for thinking about the diet of the West African individual that you were discussing?
[00:58:37.17] OK, well, thank you. Those are great questions. I'm going to try and answer them very briefly so that we can get as many questions in as possible.
[00:58:44.95] So we found many, many bones scattered across the surface of the ground, and we collected those up. As a matter of fact, the total number of bones we gathered that were loose was 80 cubic meters, which I estimated in feet would fill a tower that was 6 feet wide by 13 feet long by 33 feet high.
[00:59:20.33] And the attitude of Indigenous people and of local people, mestizo people in Peru towards human remains is very different than in other areas of the world, and it has been different, at least, so that this has occurred, especially in trying to search for other things. If bones were encountered, they're just removed, looking for items that are more saleable.
[00:59:55.98] So a lot of our studies in the book-- for example, chapter, I think, it's 4-- is actually from this 80 cubic meters of bones that Cathy Gaither and her students actually went through and basically looked for signs of various kinds of illnesses and so forth and then reported on them. I couldn't go into detail tonight about those.
[01:00:19.08] How the African skull's diet was analyzed was through basically looking at different kinds of isotopes. Isotopes are variants of elements that are lodged in our bones, and depending on what your diet is, you will have different kinds of isotopes. And so that is the analysis done by specialists. Our specialist John Krigbaum at the University of Florida, and he was able to make those distinctions.
[01:00:53.01] And then to the question about-- I'm not sure. The question about the human remains being in place-- they were buried underneath the church floor. The floor bricks were probably removed. They were placed in the ground. Some just went on top of the other, and that's how we found them. But they were semi-exposed when we found them.
[01:01:15.91] Great, thank you. So there's another couple of questions that are sort of food related. So one is commenting that potato isn't a coastal cultivar, and so where did the potato remains found on the site come from? And another one-- was the fish found almost exclusively anchoveta? And then the Latin name, Engraulis ringens-- makes you wonder how the exuberance of the Humboldt ecosystem still sustains populations in the same coast. So yeah.
[01:01:55.32] Yeah, well, potatoes can be grown on the coast. They don't grow very well. It is a highland crop. The potatoes may have been traded or exchanged from further inland quite likely. But my colleague, Gabriel Prieto at the University of Florida, has done a lot of work recently on fish, and we, a lot of us, including old timers like me, back in the '70s thought that anchovies were really sort of a major food item. All the evidence seems to be strongly suggesting, especially the work that Gabriel has done, that they only eat anchovies when there wasn't really much else around.
[01:02:42.52] And like modern people-- actually, Mike Moseley, his predecessor at Florida, once wrote an article. I think it was called "Anchovies-- They're Not Just for Pizza Anymore"-- but that they would prefer to eat fish. And most of what we found were large knife-- the kind of fish you'd like to eat today, those were the kinds of fish they'd like to eat back then, too.
[01:03:06.49] OK, that makes sense. So quick question-- what were bridge bottles for?
[01:03:13.38] Oh, the double-spout-and-bridge? Well, that's a very good-- oh, these are excellent questions. Hard to know.
[01:03:24.79] I mean, this is getting into prehistoric issues, but I think that a lot of the ceramics such as double-spout-and-bridge bottles, they weren't really used so much to contain things as they were used as status items. They were nice-- like the plate of Niagara Falls that your Aunt Millie had hanging on the wall, I think these were the equivalent things except they didn't have walls that they could hang them in because the adobe just wouldn't keep the nail in. So they probably just had a double-spout-and-bridge bottle instead, saying, look, that's what I got when I went to the huaca.
[01:04:06.97] Yeah. All right, so here's a question for us museum folks.
[01:04:12.97] OK.
[01:04:13.80] It says that in Virginia, the Jamestown Rediscovery Project has done a remarkable job of combining ongoing early 17th-century historical archaeology with public education, including an excellent site museum. Is there any similar interest in Trujillo-- excuse my Spanish-- and Peru in early colonial sites as locations for tourism and education?
[01:04:41.68] Wow, that is a great question, and it opens up-- we could have a whole discussion just on that question alone because the truth of the matter is-- and I was planning to maybe talk more about this at the beginning, but I was short on time. Well, let me just put it this way. I actually have this in the book, too.
[01:05:05.95] When I first decided to do this project, a very dear colleague of mine, who will go unmentioned, who is a very distinguished archaeologist, Peruvian archaeologist, said to me, well, you know, Jeffrey, in Peru, when we say archaeology, we mean prehistoric archaeology. So the colonial period is a very tough thing to deal with. It wasn't a very pleasant time. It was a hard time. It was a time of turmoil.
[01:05:41.15] And one of the interesting things, I think, about the work we've done in Magdalena is you don't see the pain. In some ways, you see more of the joy. You see all these nice baubles and beads and baubles, bangles, and beads.
[01:05:59.02] And the archaeology can almost give a false impression if you're not careful of that things were-- they got all this new stuff that they kind of liked to have-- so that our understanding of the colonial period has been really rooted in the grand narrative of Pizarro and the conquest and all these great historical, large-scale, CinemaScope-type events, not the everyday life of lived experience. And that's I think, what archaeology can get at, but you have to be careful that you don't see it in the wrong way.
[01:06:37.48] So I'm not the only archaeologist now-- in the recent years, it's become very popular. My good colleague, Steve Wernke, at Vanderbilt University, Gabriel Prieto at Florida, many people in Peru are now starting to-- Parker VanValkenburgh, another one-- starting to see the colonial period as a worthy topic in and of itself even though this is a hard topic to deal with because we're dealing with very troubled times.
[01:07:10.49] And I think how we negotiate that issue in terms of dealing with a message to the public, whether that's public in North America, Europe, or South America, is a challenge. My good colleague, David Hurst Thomas, of the American Museum of Natural History, who worked for many, many years in missions in the southwest and southeast, he gives a whole lecture about how there's this romance of the mission in California, as the mission bells toll and so forth and so on. That belies the hardship and the pain that occurred with the establishment of missions.
[01:07:51.73] So we have to balance. We have to balance both the horrible things and the changes that actually brought some good things as part of that story, and it's still in process. It's still in progress.
[01:08:06.03] Great, thank you. And I should say, amongst these questions are many congratulations--
[01:08:10.54]
[01:08:11.06] --on the book and on the lecture. So here's another one, someone asking if you might say something about the broader pattern of [SPANISH] across the Chicama Valley. Are all the other sites also under modern towns?
[01:08:27.82] We know that there were six [SPANISH] in the Chicama Valley. Most of those are accounted for, and most of those are modern towns. So there's a town called Chocope, for example, that is a modern town. The town of Chicama was a [SPANISH] town. And there were [SPANISH] in the highlands, too. It's not just in the coast. That's just happened where I happen to work.
[01:08:55.61] My wife, Sarah, who did the amazing chapter on the playing cards in the book, by the way, handed me a note that I should mention that in terms of that question about bringing these things to the public, that the Fundación Wiese, which was a huge help-- and I could never have done, nor could anyone else have done any of this work at the site if it hadn't been the Fundación Wiese in Lima-- helped the project in innumerable ways. And they have built a museum, actually, at the site, which includes both the prehistoric materials as well as the colonial materials.
[01:09:36.34] And the greatest number of tourists who come to visit the El Brujo Archaeological Complex are schoolchildren, which is really great, because ultimately, the people who most benefit from this, are most interested in this, and should be most interested in this are the people of Peru.
[01:09:58.17] Yeah. Great, thank you. So I think that we'll-- I'm trying to get-- here's another one. Jeff, I'm curious about your finding of Manihot esculenta--
[01:10:13.05] That's manioc, right?
[01:10:14.31] --in that coastal context at the time. Is there any information regarding how they eliminated the poison? In the Amazon, it's done by straining the mass of yuca. Just wondering how they did it on the coast, if you know.
[01:10:27.75] Right, well, manioc, as I said in the talk, one of the really interesting things that's occurred in the last 10 years or so is because we can now analyze phytoliths, which are these little crystals that are in plant fibers, as well as starch grains, we're finding manioc as a major food item throughout the coast of Peru, including my former mentor and colleague, Robert Benfer, down in the central coast of Peru, Gabriel Prieto, and many others.
[01:11:13.25] There's two kinds of manioc. There's what they call the bitter manioc, which is what they had to squeeze. They have to basically soak it. They grind it up into sort of shreds, and then they soak it in water to get the tannic acid-- I think it's tannic acid-- out.
[01:11:33.04] But there's also sweet manioc, and sweet manioc you don't have to do that to. And I don't know for sure, but I think that most of the manioc on the coast is sweet manioc. So they didn't have to do that.
[01:11:43.78] OK, that sounds good. All right, one last question, and then I have a final comment. Did your project find any evidence of labor exploitation and the forced migration of the Indigenous peoples of the north coast of Peru to work in the mines in the Andes Mountains?
[01:12:05.80] Yeah, that's a very good question. Again, partly due to time-- we do know that in the later 16th and into the 17th century and for quite a while after, there was a conscription of Indigenous people to go work in the mines all the way down in Bolivia, in Potosí. It was basically a mountain of silver that fueled the economy of the Spanish Armada, for example, and the Spanish Empire. And that probably was occurring in Magdalena, too.
[01:12:48.53] One of the great things about the book is, again, I have nothing but amazing praise for our historian, Rocío Delibes, currently of the University of Sevilla in Spain-- did an amazing job of looking in the archives to, in a sense, put the historical flesh on the archaeological bones of the story of the people of Magdalena. We don't have any direct account that I remember of people being conscripted from Magdalena to work in the mines, but it's very likely that they were.
[01:13:25.36] The people of Magdalena-- I maybe should have emphasized more-- probably were people from the region that were all forced to live together in a way that they hadn't been before. Now, one of the interesting questions is, from how far away were they incorporated into the town? That's going to require a lot more work. We don't really have enough human remains in good shape with good contexts that we could do that kind of study, but there may be other ways to get out the question, maybe some historical documents. So we don't really quite know, but it's likely that they were conscripted.
[01:14:03.37] Oh, OK. Thanks, Jeff. So I just finish with one comment that came in, I suspect, in fact, I'm pretty sure, from one of your ex-students that says, remember what you taught us at Ripon College.
[01:14:15.93] Uh oh.
[01:14:16.25] If you don't know what it is for, it is religious. So I'm sure that seemed like-- I could just imagine you just saying that. So anyhow, thank you so much, Jeff. It really was a great evening. I'm sorry that we weren't able to get to everybody's questions.
[01:14:34.99] I could see, we've just come up on the screen with the link to purchase a book, which, having bought a copy myself, I can definitely recommend, and, as we said, a discount. So thank you, everybody, for joining us.
[01:14:49.33] Thanks, everyone. Thank you.
[01:14:50.98] And take care, everyone.
[01:14:53.17] Thank you, Jane. Thanks. Bye.