Abstract:

Throughout Hispanic America, but especially along the South American Pacific, legacies of the colonial experience have rendered the Afro-descendant reality invisible and marginal to national identity and social equity. Collaborative and interdisciplinary research by Haciendas of Nasca Archaeological Project (PAHN), the first archaeological project focused on Afro-Peruvian material culture, aims to understand the daily lived experience of enslaved people on Jesuit haciendas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Jesuit haciendas of San Francisco Xavier and San Joseph in Nasca’s Ingenio Valley, were the two largest and most profitable vineyards in the Viceroyalty of Peru, and held a substantial enslaved African descendant population. During their tenure in the valley, from 1619 until the Jesuit expulsion by the Crown in 1767, Jesuit administrators annexed new lands and properties, in the process acquiring new resources, fields, and importantly water rights. While PAHN’s previous excavations were focused on the domestic and productive nuclei of the two main Jesuit haciendas of the valley, recent excavations (July 2018) at the Hacienda La Ventilla, an annex of San Joseph, focused on its distillery complex, shedding light on slave-produced grape brandy (pisco or aguardiente de uva). At the time of its annexation by San Joseph in 1706, La Ventilla was at the center of a dispute over water for the valley’s rapidly expanding agroindustrial estates. Investigations at this site build on historical documentation and earlier drone and walkover surveys by specifically exploring enslaved daily life and production away from the administrative center of the hacienda’s cores.

Bio: 

Brendan Weaver is a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Archaeology Center. He specializes in the archaeology and historical anthropology of labor, slavery, and the African diaspora of Latin America, and he directs the Haciendas of Nasca Archaeological Project. Weaver completed his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 2015. Prior to coming to Stanford, he was the Mellon Institute Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Anthropology at Berea College (Kentucky, 2016-2018), and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland, 2015-2016).