ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the impact of conquest and colonialism on indigenous Andean peoples from a cross-cultural perspective. Using pre-Hispanic and colonial period examples from two classes of material culture, it explores the impacts of transculturation on ceremonial drinking vessels and male tunics in the Andean highlands. Andean kerus and qeros (ceramic and wooden cups for ritual chicha beer consumption) date back over 2000 years, and their forms and decorations reveal patterns in ritual observation, evangelization, and creolization from the Tiwanaku State (AD 400-1000) through the Spanish colonial period. Complementary data come from parallel analyses of indigenous unku (adult male tunics) before and after the conquest. Together, tunics and ritual cups reveal patterns in the ways that the Tiwanaku, Inka, and Spanish impacted others and the degree to which each state prioritized cultural conversion. The comparison between different kinds of polities problematizes generalizations about degrees of assimilation and cultural exchange within settler colonial states. How did contact with a dominant polity affect these local religious artifacts and symbols of indigenous ethnic identity? What effect do the two kinds of states (the territorially aggressive Inka and Spanish versus the non-militaristic Tiwanaku) have on these patterns of variability?
