Forgotten Territorialities

The Materiality of Indigenous Pasts

Gustavo Verdesio

he research produced on colonial Latin America in the last two decades by scholars trained in language and literature departments shows dramatic differences in comparison to what was previously produced in the eld. Since the early 1980s, these scholars have been building, slowly but effectively, a corpus of works that shows a higher degree of awareness of the complexity of colonial situations.1 These changes were acknowledged by Rolena Adorno in a 1988 article, where she describes what she rst calls a paradigm shift cambio de paradigma (11) and later an emergence of certain new practices and prioritiesaparicin de ciertas prioridades y prcticas nuevas (12). That shift consists mainly of two theoretical moves: rst, a change of focus from literature to discourse; second, a growing concern for the problematic of the Other (11). This means that practitioners in the eld of colonial Latin American literature stopped worrying about the celebration of the literary value of texts and focused, instead, on the diversity of discourses that characterize a colonial situation (14). Such a shift of focus is related to the theoretical move proposed by Walter Mignolo (e.g., 1992, 810; 1991), that consists of distinguishing between a canon and a corpus-oriented research. For Mignolo (1989a), a study of the totality of texts (be they written in European alphabetic systems or not) produced under colonial situations is mandatory if one wants to account for, and understand properly, a colonial situation. In his opinion, one should talk about colonial semiosis (the totality of symbolic messages and exchanges in colonial situations) instead of colonial discoursean expression that limits the corpus to verbal messages, whether oral or written. One of the consequences of the move he proposed was the incorporation

N e p a n t l a : V i e w s f r o m S o u t h 2.1 Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press

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of maps, amoxtllis, kipus, and other objects that served as material support for symbolic messages, into the research agenda of colonial Latin American studies produced by members of language and literature departments (see Mignolo 1989b and 1992, among many others). The incorporation of nondiscursive sign systems, in addition to the emergence of a series of studies focusing on authors of indigenous descentsuch as Guaman Poma, Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui, and Titu Cusi Yupanqui from the Andean region, as well as the publication of Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitls work and a reassessment of the Popol Vuh and the Relaciones geogrcas, from Mesoamericaand the appearance of new studies on women writersbesides the already canonical Sor Juana Ins de la Cruzare symptoms of the so-called paradigm shift in colonial Latin American studies. According to both Adorno (1988) and Mignolo (1992), all this results in a new situation in the eld characterized by the incorporation of the indigenous, female, and other non-European/nonpatriarchal perspectives to the scholarship produced within the boundaries of the discipline. All this progress toward a less colonized view of colonial times is undeniable. However, it is my contention that there is still a lot of work to do, if ones goal is to produce a more complete picture of colonial semiosis. One of the issues that needs attention is the dearth of studies on colonial situations in territories occupied by Amerindians who did not organize their societies around a state. Most works published in the area have as their object the texts produced about (and sometimes, although less frequently, by) the indigenous cultures usually considered the most developed: the Inca, the Maya, and the Mexica or Aztec. As a consequence, the geographic areas favored by a high percentage of the research in the eld of Latin American colonial studies are Mesoamerica and the Andes. Other geographic areas and peoples are thus, more often than not, neglected. The vast majority of scholars trained in language and literature departments do not pay much attention to the existence of, for example, Guarani culture despite the fact that it covered an enormous expanse of land and that its members outnumbered most of the other Amerindian populations. The case of other cultures that did not organize themselves around a state (for example, hunter-gatherers) is even worse: almost nobody in the eld studies them.2 To make matters worse, extinct prehistoric cultures receive very little attention from scholars in the discipline.3 We could speculate endlessly about the possible reasons for this neglect. However, one possible cause is the ethnocentric prejudice of scholars when they choose their object of

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study. Practitioners of the discipline may prefer to study the great civilizations of the continent because our ideological framework is determined by a teleological and evolutionary criterion. To put it another way, what may make the three great cultures so attractive to us, Western scholars, is their high level of social development in the framework of the Occidental episteme. Our way of understanding history as a teleological progression, as an evolution toward a certain goal or ideal, makes the Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures look much closer than the others to the evolutionary ideal that predominates in our Western societies: they had a state, good administrative organization, armies, division of labor, and so forth. In other words, those cultures resembled what we consider (consciously or not) the highest degree of evolution possible. That highest degree of evolution coincides, of course, with the one reached by Occidental culture. Other indigenous cultures, ignored by our discipline, were more difcult to compare, in evolutionary terms, to the stages of organization reached by Western culture. Their incommensurability in relation to our cognitive framework might well be, as I suggested above, one of the causes for the scant interest they have inspired among scholars in the eld of Latin American colonial studies. However, if our goal is to account for the colonial clash in its entirety, we must pay more attention to those cultures. As I mentioned above, we do not know enough about what happened in the territory dominated by the Inca, Maya, and Mexica before the development of these three cultures or about these cultures themselves, due to the frequent generalizations we make about them, thus downplaying the dramatic differences between the diverse regions and subregions that formed their vast territories.4 Moreover, still another blind spot in our research agendas affects the knowledge produced about even the best-known pre-Columbian cultures: an almost blind faith in the truth-value of colonial texts supplemented by a lack of interest in material culture. One of the ways to avoid some of the traps of such a faith in the text is to study the ways in which European subjects constructed America beyond the discursive level. With all due respect to contributions such as Edmundo OGormans (1958), which focus on the discursive invention of the lands and peoples of the Americas, I believe we need to pay more attention to the other ways in which that invention took place. In order to understand that invention, it is necessary to represent it as a long process that included acts of actual territorial appropriation. That is why I think it is necessary to focus not only on the intellectual operations that granted being (43) to that unknown (from a European perspective) lump of land, but also on the

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other actions the Occidental subject performed in American lands. Those actions had very concrete effects over the territory, the fauna, the ora, and the human beings that populated the Americas. Those actions are proof that the Spaniards and other Europeans who arrived in America did not limit themselves to rethinking the landscape, but that they also set out to modify, through specic actions, the nature they encountered. Confronted with an unknown nature, European subjects chose to modify it, as Antonello Gerbi (1992, 337) points out. They decided to do so because the Indians they encountered had not achieved, from a European perspective, a total control of nature; on the contrary, from the Occidental vantage point, the Amerindians were at the mercy of nature (Gerbi 1993, 1011). Instead of doing what civilized man doesdominate nature Amerindians were viewed as dominated by natural forces. This is a particularly serious aw from an Occidental point of view, according to Frederick Turner (1994, xxv), due to the tendency of Western subjects to view nature as a commodity, as something that is there to be used by human beings. In America, it was from the cities that European subjects organized the conquest of the land. This operation entailed, as we will see, a modication of aboriginal nature. In the Ro de la Plata region, the names of these cities are Santa F, Buenos Aires, and later (much later) Montevideo: from these urban centers European civilization expanded to the rest of the region, thus modifying the landscape forever. These cities were located on the border that separated the walled structure characteristic of European cities from the natural open spaces of the countryside. The pampas that surrounded these cities were an obstacle for the expansion of Western civilizational patterns around the Ro de la Plata, but, unfavorable conditions notwithstanding, some of these urban settlements started to grow in the second half of the sixteenth century; from these sites, slowly but relentlessly, European civilization began to produce changes in the region. One key element for the expansion of European civilization was the introduction of bovine cattle. In particular, the introduction of cattle in one of the regions I propose to study, the northern shore of the Ro de la Plata (the territory of modern-day Uruguay), strongly inuenced the forms social life would take on those lands. Bovine and equine cattle were introduced to that territory at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The animals reproduced immediately, reaching numbers in the six digits, according to some testimonies, like Flix de Azaras (1969).5 These animals became the rst European occupants of the region because it was considered at that time as tierras de ningn provechounprotable landsthat is, lands not

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good enough to justify the existence of a Spanish settlement. As a consequence of their rapid reproduction, the material foundation for pastoral life started to develop: killing cows and riding horses would be the most common means of subsistence for the Europeans who would later settle in the region. Numerous testimonies by travelers concur in their appreciation of both the cattle wealth available and the fertility of the land. For three centuries, travelers marveled at the abundance they saw and, above all, at the culture of waste that abundance engendered among the criollos and other locals (including gauchos and Amerindians).6 What those observers did not mention (probably because they were not aware of it) were the ecological changes that were taking place before their eyes. The fact is that when Charles Darwin visited the region in the 1830s, the multitudes of cattle had produced serious modications to the areas biota. Their grazing and their feces started a process of modication of the ora and the soil, as Darwin (1989, 119) noticed. Yet cattle and human beings were not the only agents of biological change: some species of trees from the Old Worldsuch as the orange and the peachwere also responsible for ecological changes (Azara 1969, 81, 98). Today, Uruguayan lands are seen as a cattle paradise, as a community of (white) European settlers, or as a New Europe, depending on the authors.7 This way of representing the territory, although based on veriable elements, fails (or forgets) to account for the historical moment that was the beginning of social life and the changes inicted on nature, as we know both today. It was the modication of nature that paved the way not only for the emergence of a nation-state, but also for the destruction of all possible alternative forms of social life in the territory. As a consequence, some animals and plants disappeared, and others changed their habitat or their behavior.8 Although the ecological disturbance was dramatic and some of its effects were denitive, I dont want to give the impression that I am attempting here to explain the changes in the landscape in purely ecological terms. Although there is some truth to Alfred Crosbys (1996, 7) assertion about the ecological component of European imperialisms success, I believe one has to be cautious about embracing models that explain the success of an ecological invasion by recourse to an alleged superiority of the European biota over its American counterpart. This is, in nuce, the thesis elaborated by Crosby in his two seminal books. In his opinion, the European biota had achieved a certain degree of biological complexity during the Neolithic era, as a consequence of the development of agriculture and the domestication of

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animals. Because the corresponding period occurred later in the Americas, the complexity of the biota European conquistadores encountered in the new lands was lower than the one they brought with them (1820). In Crosbys model, some diseases (unknown to Amerindians) helped make way for European invaders; killer microorganisms helped decimate even the most densely populated Amerindian settlements (195216). However, the reproduction and success of old-world species (plants, animals, diseases, and human beings) do not explain, by themselves, the radical modication of the American environment. It is impossible to understand that process without taking into account the political and economic situation in Europe that made the expansion of Western culture possible (Cronon 1995, 165). For example, William Cronon believes that to talk about ecological factors, like the opportunistic microorganisms that invaded a biota not prepared for their arrival, in isolation, is to forget the relevance of economic ones: it was both the economic and technological transformations taking place in Europe that allowed the continent to send its people to populate the rest of the world (16162). In the case of the northern shore of the Ro de la Plata, the changes suffered by the ecosystem were a consequence of the European settlers need to cultivate crops and raise cattle. That is, the changes in the land were a consequence of the need to produce commodities marketable in the context of a global market dominated by Europe. That is why it is fair to say that Hernandarias (governor of the region at the beginning of the seventeenth century) had a political as well as an economic motivation when he decided to populate the region and to introduce cattle in it. The territory of the modern-day nation-state of Uruguaya territory conceived by its inhabitants as something natural, something given; as something that was always already thereis thus a consequence of the ecological changes produced by the economic exploitation of the land started by Hernandarias. The modication of the environment that started in the seventeenth century is largely ignored by present-day inhabitants of the northern shore of the Ro de la Plata and by those who produce knowledge about it. What I propose is, then, to view the current situation of that territory against the background of the actions that transformed it into what is today. In other words, I propose to understand the symbolic representations of that territory from a diachronic perspective. In this way, the observer will be able to study current representations of the land against the background of the foundational destruction that was the condition of possibility of its current shape and development.

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The image of the Americas we can get from studying European appropriations (be they discursive, ideological, or material) of those lands is rather incomplete if the objective pursued is the study of a colonial situation in which territorial representations and practices were not exclusively European. Amerindians of diverse ethnic origins also conceptualized and practiced the space they inhabited. That is why some scholars have undertaken the study of indigenous territorial lorea knowledge that was contemporary, but very different, from the one produced by European cartographic and territorial practices. Louis de Vorsey (1992) has studied the presence of indigenous cultural traces in European colonial maps in order to rescue (at least partially) the Amerindians spatial conceptualizations. Walter Mignolo and Barbara Mundy have studied the case of the Relaciones geogrcas, the reports requested by the Spanish Crown from the local authorities about the site where the settlement was located. These relaciones included the responses of the Crowns ofcials in America to several questions (from fty to two hundred) and a pintura (a picture, a drawing) of the area, generally drawn by an indio viejo (an old Indian).9 The pintura is not, then, a geographic, but a chorographic representation of the territory. Chorography is the knowledge of the particularities of a territory, as opposed to geography, which is the general representation of the lands without attention to topographic details. For a more detailed description of chorography, consider the following passage by sixteenth-century cosmographer Alonso de Santa Cruz (1983, 203):
Geography is a demonstration of the totality of the known Earth, with the inclusion of the most principal parts that it depends on; it differs from chorography in that the latter, by describing all the places in detail, manifests each of those places in particular and all they contain. It describes the smallest parts found in those places, like their harbors, villages, rivers, and similar things; . . . the goal of chorography is to represent, successively, a part of a whole, as if the effort were to paint or to resemble an eye or an ear, whereas geography pays attention to the whole, respecting its proportions, as if its goal were to paint the whole head. (My translation)

This tendency to represent the particular, without relating it to the totalityor with little interest in the global pictureis, according to William Boelhower (1987, 5051), a very important distinction that allows

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us to understand the colonial encounter, because the Amerindians, who had a chorographic notion of space, were invisible to the European gaze, which was dominated by a geographic conception. The uniform space created by geography, that articial construct, rendered the indigenous local spaces insignicant (51). However, in the Relaciones geogrcas, the European subject depended on the chorographic knowledge of the indios viejos to learn about the topography of a specic place. This, according to Boelhower, was due to the fact that the Amerindian had the eye as a measure, which is tantamount to saying that he or she was not lost without a compass (53). Mignolos and Mundys work on the Relaciones geogrcas and Louis de Vorseys research on the presence of traces of indigenous territorial knowledge in European maps are very important steps toward a more balanced study of colonial semiosis. In one of his articles, Mignolo (1989b, 97) proposes an interpretive apparatus that should depend neither on just one cultural tradition (the Occidental one) nor on a single locus of enunciation, but should acknowledge the existence of more than one cultural tradition. The hermeneutic tradition predominant in the West tends to suppress other traditions to which the knowing subject does not belong (98). What Mignolo proposes, then, is a comparative study of human interaction in colonial situations (9394). For this reason, Mignolo argues that we, practitioners of colonial studies, need to construct an interpretive system that entails a comparative understanding of semiotic interactions across cultural boundaries; in sum, what he proposes is to rethink the way in which we understand (97). In order to achieve such an interpretive system, and to account for the indigenous side of colonial semiosis, he has undertaken research projects that include the study of graphic indigenous territorial representations produced before the colonial encounter (see Mignolo 1989b and 1993, among others). The importance of his efforts is undeniable, and they contribute to the construction of the new hermeneutics he proposes. Having said that, I believe that the study of indigenous territorial representations drawn on diverse surfaces does not have to be the dead end of a research agenda that attempts to compare European maps with indigenous, alternative territorial representations. In my opinion, the study of hard copiesthat is, of territorial representations on durable surfacesmay still be a research agenda strongly inuenced by ideological biases originating in a literate, European episteme. This operation consists in opposing a drawing on a durable surface (a map) to an equivalent object of indigenous originany form of

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indigenous territorial representation, like the amoxtllis of Mesoamerica. This comparison of two different conceptualizations of space during the colonial encounter is, in my opinion, strongly conditioned by the European model of territorial representation, which leads Mignolo to undertake the study of an indigenous object that resembles Occidental maps. What I mean is that we do not need to limit our agenda to the study of the indigenous presence in European maps and to aboriginal representations on durable surfaces in order to recover the Amerindians spatial conceptualizations. According to Denis Wood (1992, 32), all human beings have the capacity to conceive of their relation to the space that surrounds them through the production of mental maps.10 Some cultures make material maps, and others do not. As Wood states, to possess knowledge about the territory is very different from transmitting that knowledge to others (34). It is not unusual to nd cases of Amerindians who do not customarily produce territorial representations on durable surfaces and yet who, at Europeans request, are able to draw them. It is appropriate, then, to distinguish between mapmaking and mapping, the mental representation of spacebetween cultures that make maps and cultures that do not feel the need to produce them. If we accept this distinction, it is very difcult to limit our study to the mapmaking cultures and deny the existence of spatial conceptualizations by the cultures that have not produced that kind of object. Elsewhere, I have proposed two possible ways to partially retrieve the spatial conceptualizations and practices of the indigenous peoples (of so-called historical time) who did not produce maps: the study of the information provided by colonial chronicles and the scrutiny of the most recent archaeological evidence (Verdesio 1997). In this way, it will be possible to see to what extent the continent that European cartography represents as a blank page was already inscribed by the Amerindians spatial practices; that is, it will be possible to detect the traces left by the Indians on the land, their itineraries, and so forth. The goal is, then, to restore some materiality to those peoples who were, literally, erased from the mapand from the history written by Western civilization. The study of the material aspects of aboriginal spatiality could very well be a tool to recover indigenous historical agency. As we have already seen, the studies on the representation of the territory in colonial times by Mignolo and Mundy analyze maps and other territorial representations as symbolic systems that tell us something about

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the worldview of their authors from both sides of the colonial clash. However, studies of the land itself are scarce. The materiality of the actual possession of the territory, of the exploitation of the land, needs to be explored further, among other reasons because the material aspects of culture can be as meaningful as symbolic systems are. Material culture, then, can tell us a lot about the worldview of the culture that produced it. It can tell us, also, something about indigenous knowledges that are not recorded on sign carriers such as maps, pictographic writings, or kipus. Moreover, that material culture is the only extant document of those prehistoric and historic Amerindians who did not produce sign carriers of any kind. In his monumental Darker Side of the Renaissance, Mignolo (1995a) proposes to study the materiality of sign carriers in colonial situations. Consequently, he embarks on a comparative study of European books and their indigenous correlate: the Mesoamerican amoxtllis (69122). This kind of analysis allows him to offer valuable insights on many issues. When he limits his study to two kinds of objects that seem to have an analogous (albeit not identical) function in two different cultures, the materiality he deals with, then, is one that allows him to compare indigenous artifacts to European onesa comparison that is possible only because there is an indigenous correlate for the Western book. However, that kind of comparison is not possible in all cases, because not all indigenous cultures produced records that resembled Western sign carriers. The absence of such an artifact in a given indigenous culture would prevent scholars from including that culture in a comparative study. Thus, the materiality studied by Mignolo is, paradoxically, what prevents him from studying cultures that lacked certain kinds of objects, such as sign carriers. The notion of materiality I am interested in is broader and includes, besides sign carriers, all kinds of objects. For a research project that seeks to account for the worldview, social organizations, and everyday life of indigenous peoples who did not produce sign carriers, archaeology can be a helpful tool. I am particularly interested in the interpretation of objects understood as relics or vestiges of human activitiesthat is, as testimony of the actions that produced them. In this respect, archaeological methods are attractive because they propose a study of objects that does not view them only qua objects, but rather as the nal product of a human activity. Of course, archaeology is not a science exempt from subjectivities: the epistemological and ideological problems that affect it are multiple. Despite these problems, there is one thing archaeology can do for colonial Latin American literary and cultural studies scholars: put us in contact with the

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actual objects, with the material aspects of a culture that we usually study only through its textual production. Such an awareness of materiality can help us, in more than one way, to avoid interpretive mistakes. For instance, it may remind investigators of indigenous cultures that even the most homogenizing of them, like the Incas, hosted in their territories a vast array of ethnic groups that left innumerable testimoniesincluding pottery and architecturethat distinguish them from the dominant culture. In this regard, a study of the material culture of, say, the Huarochiri or the Huamanga regions of the Andes could help supplement the valuable research produced on those territories and peoples by ethnohistorians such as Karen Spalding and Steve Stern. It can also give additional support to research projects such as Sabine MacCormacks impressive Religion in the Andes (1991), a book that shows, among other things, the religious diversity of the Andean world and the different ways in which the various groups negotiated power and religious belief. Archaeological methods can also help recover indigenous thought. For instance, they can clarify the ways in which religious power and political control worked or were understood in pre-Columbian states or in societies without states. For example, if we believe only what the chronicles and other documents say about the way in which the Inca state controlled the territories and peoples under its aegis, we may make a few interpretive mistakes. Recent archaeological investigations seem to indicate that the Inca did not occupy all the territories they conquered in the same way: the politico-administrative control mechanisms they devised varied substantially from location to location. The book compiled by Michael Malpass (1993) is an excellent example of what can be done when archaeologists compare the results of their excavations to the data offered by documents and chronicles: what the latter say is not always conrmed by archaeological research. On the contrary, settlements that documents present as important administrative centers do not always live up to this billing when their sites are excavated. Conversely, some settlements thought to be of lesser importance show a much more careful deployment of Inca administrative control and attention after the examination of archaeological data. What should interest us is the reconstruction of a cultural context a series of activities that go beyond the mere study of indigenous conceptions and thought. Without that context it is difcult to understand the content of those conceptions and thought that Mignolo and Rodolfo Kusch seek to retrieve from oblivion. From different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, Kusch (1977, 11) and Mignolo (1995b, 33) have proposed to

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understand the indigenous cultural past in a way that considers it not only as ethnographic material but as a way of thinking in its own right. I propose something similar: to study how that indigenous thinking manifests itself in the continuity of human practices over a certain territorythat is, the uses of space that constitute the memory of landscape (Erickson 1993, 381). The student of territorial conceptions and practices should keep in mind that the landscape capital they represent is always the result of material modications of the land by human beings. And those material modications are not only manifestations of thinkingunderstood only as worldview or knowledge productionbut also part of a broader, life-world context. Thus, I believe we should look not only for an archaeology of knowledge, but for an actual archaeology of living that focuses on the study of human life understood as a series of conceptions and practices. In sum, what I think is needed is an archaeology of living that does not differ much from what Kusch (1976, 84) proposed: to study indigenous subjects in the context of their cultural coherencewhich is tantamount to understanding culture as a strategy for living (98). Hence the need, for the Argentine philosopher, to recover life itself (100).11 In any case, the way in which we should recover that cultural complex of conceptions and practices that we call life should not exclude the help of archaeologists. In this respect, the efforts made by what is known as cognitive archaeology (see Renfrew and Zubrow 1997) and postprocessual archaeology are extremely promising in their attempt to retrieve cognitive patterns and traits, ancient knowledges and practices, from the preserved material evidence. In this way, by joining forces with practitioners of other disciplines, it will be possible to get a little closer to those local knowledges of the past understood as part of a way of lifeunderstood as living. This living is perceived by us, twentieth-century scholars, as a materiality, as vestiges of human activities that could serve as a guide to the practices that produced them in remote times. The idea is, then, to get a glimpse at the livesthe vital experiencesof those subjects from the past, in order to be able to incorporate them as living contributions to contemporary human life. What I mean is that the place of those subjects and their local knowledges from yesteryear in the present should have a status similar to the one we assign to modern subjects and knowledges, because their contribution is also for humankind as a whole. Without that basic respect for the Others and their knowledges, it will be impossible to take seriously the contribution of their knowledges to humankind. This respect should be the point of departure of our research,

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understood less as a merely academic enterprise than as a detotalizing practice of solidarity with the Other. I will come back to this topic in relation to the Latin American subaltern studies agenda later in this essay. The reconstruction of human activities in the territory should not only comprise the period covered by the life span of the so-called Amerindians of historical time (that is, the ones encountered by Europeans on their arrival in the continent) but also extend back in time to the activities of the so-called Paleo-Indians who preceded them. Thus, I suggest that we focus on those prehistoric cultures forgotten by most investigations in the eld of Latin American colonial studies, on those ethnic groups that did not organize social life around urban centers or states: hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists, among others. In the case of the northern shore of the Ro de la Plata, the Amerindians the Spaniards encountered at their arrival had been inhabiting the land since the year 2000 b.p. (before the present) (Pi Hugarte 1993, 55), which means that the fauna and ora of the territory had been used by human beings before them. These ethnic groups of so-called historical time did not operate, then, on a blank page, but on an already inhabited, inscribed space. The Amerindians that preceded historical-time Indians on the land not only used it but also altered the landscape: they left visible marks, architectural constructions, petroglyphs, and pictographs. It is my contention that it is difcult (if not impossible) to attain a general view of the spatial practices that preceded the arrival of the Spaniards if we do not take into account the practices of the Amerindians of prehistoric time. The cerritos de indios or Indian mounds (visible earthen elevations up to four meters high) aroused the interest of archaeologists at a very early date.12 However, it is only since 1986 that the excavations of the Indian mounds of the easternmost part of Uruguay are being studied systematically.13 The climate of the region is humid and subtropical, and the land is mostly plain and surrounded by brooks and swamps (Bracco 1992, 45). Those elevations have been built by human beings, whose practices show a deliberate occupation strategy (Ferrs in Vidart 1996, 140; Lpez Mazz and Bracco 1991, 5). The oldest of these mounds has been dated to 5000 b.p. (Jos M. Lpez Mazz, personal communication, July 1999). The resources available in the landscape, at that time, were more abundant than was believed before the series of excavations that began in 1986. The analyses of the remains of fauna found in the mounds show an abundance of big

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mammalsespecially deer that were much bigger than those now known (Lpez Mazz and Bracco 1992, 274). Another kind of food available was (and still is) the nuts of the palm tree (Buti capitata), a tree that covers, today, around two hundred thousand hectares. It is estimated that at the time of the occupation of the mounds, the area covered by the palms must have been even bigger (275). Archaeologists have found evidence of consumption of the nut buti: burnt seedsa nding that changes dramatically the archaeological panorama of the region as represented by traditional scholarship. The model proposed now describes a region populated by hunter-gatherers who exploited a highly productive territory. This model is possible thanks to the high return values (which is the difference between investment and benet) of the available resources: cervidae and nutsconsidered, in archaeological literature, as the species of highest return value (276). This economic picture, together with the high number of mounds found, allows archaeologists to advance hypotheses that contradict ideas predominant before the 1986 excavations. The model they propose today is of a territory that hosted a highly concentrated population with economic strategies so efcient that they would tolerate a high investment of energy (the building of mound structures) without a utilitary return. The model attributes to these hunter-gatherers an annual exploitation of different environments following the seasonal cycle (277). To talk about seasonal exploitation of the land presupposes that these groups settled in different regions at different times during the year. In the case of the mounds, the available evidence suggests that the area where they are located was occupied during the spring and summer (Lpez Mazz 1995b, 94). The exploitation of resources in the time frame provided by a particular season (or seasons) did not take place exclusively at the archaeological sites that host the mounds, but extended, also, to surrounding areas located beyond the twenty-kilometer area proposed as a tentative limit for the site. The fact that seawolf fangs have been found at a site distant thirty kilometers from the coast suggests an exploitation of the land that connected the coastal zones with the lowlands where the mounds were located (Lpez Mazz and Bracco 1992, 275). This assumption leads archaeologists to conclude that the groups who built the mounds had a certain degree of sedentism, which adds still another discrepancy to the model of hunter-gatherers accepted for the region before 1986the latter are traditionally portrayed as small groups of nomadic people in constant and uneven struggle against the scarce resources offered by the environment (Lpez Mazz and Bracco 1989, 111).

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Lpez Mazz and Bracco (1992, 278) deduce the sedentism of the mound builders from the long time that the building of the structures took and from the abundance of resources offered by the environment. Human remains have been found in some mounds. All of them are located in the central part of the structure but at different depths (Femenas et al. 1990, 348), which permits us to assume a funerary function for the mounds. There are also remains of combustion associated with the burials (351), which, interestingly, do not present the traits that are typical of res used for housing or food preparation. Conversely, they seem to be classiable as instances of ceremonial or ritual combustion (Lpez Mazz 1992, 90). These funerary remains, which present a differential treatment to diverse individuals, suggest a complex society with a rather sophisticated organization of communal labor (Lpez Mazz and Bracco 1989, 111). This characteristic allows archaeologists to conjecture the incipient development of a nonegalitarian society (Lpez Mazz 1995a, 71).14 Everything we know about the mounds points to the same conclusion: the prehistoric inhabitants of the northern shore of the Ro de la Plata made inscriptions on the territory, and the activities they performed are part of the history of human practices that later developed in that same territory. That is to say, the markers they left are part of the landscape capital inherited by the human beings who came later to those same lands. The Amerindians of historical time did not fail to notice those markers, as the abundant documentation about the bichaderos (pyramids of stone built on the elevations), which served as tombs for the Charrua Indians, suggests (Pi Hugarte 1993, 11718).15 The rural inhabitants of modern Uruguay notice them also, as is proved by the refuge they seek at the top of the mounds during the frequent oods to which the region is subject. The Charruas and the rural inhabitants practices prolong, in this way, the useful life of the prehistoric mounds (Vidart 1996, 5455). There are many other studies of prehistoric Amerindians that show a sharp contrast between what was believed about them and what recent archaeological investigations suggest. Let us consider now a case from the Andean Puna, where other hunter-gatherers offer us another image of territorial practices that contradicts Occidental preconceived ideas about the region and its prehistoric inhabitants. The Puna is a cold, windy, and unfriendly environment, located four thousand meters high in the Cordillera. Western scholars have paid much attention to the complex cultures that originated in the Lake Titicaca area, but little time and effort have been devoted to the groups of hunter-gatherers that inhabited the area

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in the more remote past. Perhaps the cause of this lack of interest can be found in the marginal position of the Puna region in modern timeswhich may make scholars believe its status was the same in the past, too. Yet the most recent studies of the region indicate that, hundreds of years ago, the Puna was a densely populated area (Rick 1980, 4). The natural resources available in that zone were, contrary to what was traditionally believed (due to the lack of research on this matter), capable of providing food and housing to a high number of human beings. The survival and development of a dense population was made possible by the relative stability of natural resources in the Puna, due to its absolute absence of seasons. This situation allowed the dwellers of the region to exploit natural resources annually, without the interruptions provoked by the need to emigrate to more productive zones. This kind of annual exploitation supports the new model of the regions early population proposed by John Rick: a dense population of hunter-gatherers with a high degree of sedentism (9). This picture of the region contradicts all the assumptions we had until recently, and it allows us to view the area in a way that differs dramatically from the image Western culture has produced of it. The nutritional habits of these hunter-gatherers were limited, perhaps, to the consumption of meat and other products obtained from the vicua, a member of the camelidae family that was abundant in the region around Junin (an area containing the site of Pachamachay, from which most of the information I use in this essay comes). The presence of this animal in the region is annual. It lives in two kinds of basic groups: the band (comprised by a male individual and seven or eight females) and the troop (groups of several males, up to forty, who roam together). The band lives in a more or less xed territory, whereas the troop enjoys much more mobility (Rick 1980, 21). If one takes into account that despite this animals very shy nature, it gets used to human presence with relative ease, and if one also takes into consideration that its availability is annual and in a xed territory, one can conclude that the hunter-gatherers could not have had any trouble exploiting the vicua for meat and other subproducts. According to Rick, the relatively constant numbers of vicua population in the Junin area were possible because the arrival of the human being in the region may have displaced the other natural predators dangerous to the camelidae. In this hypothesis, human beings may have operated as high-level ecological regulators (23). For the Puna to become a suitable place for human beings it must have offered, besides the permanent availability of vicua, the following conditions: stone or bone for tools used in the exploitation of the camelids

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subproducts and adequate refugeswhether in the form of rock shelters or caves. Both kinds of housing locations were (and are) very abundant in the Puna (24). Moreover, in the archaeological sites excavated in the area which covers approximately 250 square metersresearchers have found abundant proof of the existence of stone and bone tools. Having provided proof of the existence of conditions for the survival and development of human beings in the Junin area, archaeologists had yet to prove the hypothesized sedentism of its inhabitants. In this respect, previous investigations about hunter-gatherers suggested two types of exploitation that consisted in (a) exhausting the resources of a given area, only to move afterward to another site, and (b) avoiding exhausting the resources of the area, in which case a certain degree of sedentism is possible. In the case of Pachamachay, all the archaeological evidence found in the refuges that served as a base of operations, and in the sites that functioned as intermediate camps between the limits of the exploited territory and the base of operations, suggests their almost permanent occupation. In sum, the new model proposed contradicts several preconceptions on which the traditional representation of the prehistory of the region was based. It suggests that the area was densely populated by vicuas and by human beings whose occupational strategy was fundamentally sedentary. This is a very important point because the degree of sedentism at that time (roughly from 5000 to 2000 b.c.) was such that it could have become the foundation of a subsequent development of a culture of cattle shepherds in the region. Let us say that if we superimpose a map of our way of representing the Puna as a human habitat upon what really occurred in that areathat is, the territorial practices of the human beings who inhabited it in prehistoric timewe will see a sort of palimpsest that will allow us to visualize that territory from a different kind of hermeneutics. That is, it will allow us to see an alternative representation of the territory and its exploitation by human agents that differs substantially from the traditional Occidental way of viewing it. Another signicant case study also comes from the Andean zone more concretely, from the Lake Titicaca area. I am referring to the practice of a form of agriculture known as raised eldsa practice that was established, approximately, between ve hundred and one thousand years before the creation of the great states of the region (Erickson 1993, 411). In the northern zone, in the territory of modern-day Bolivia, this kind of agriculture began circa three thousand years ago but was abandoned for several centuries (around 300 a.d.). It was used again between the years

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1000 and 1450 a.d. (Erickson 1992, 291). This technique for the exploitation of the land consists in building cultivable platforms, elevating them over the natural surface of the soil through the accumulation of soil and debris taken from adjacent canals, in order to allowin oodable zonesthe water to run through the canals without ooding the cultivable parcel of land. Raised elds also guarantee the irrigation of the cultivable parcel during the dry season, thereby creating an ecosystem three times richer than the prairie for the growth of planted seeds. In this way, with the use of a single technique, the prehistoric peasants were able to kill two birds with one stone: they ensured the availability of water during the dry season and avoided ooding during the rainy season (289). However, these raised elds seem to have been abandoned a few years before the arrival of the Spaniards in the region. Today, they still remain uncultivated. A group of scholars who practice experimental archaeologyusing prehistoric agricultural methods to see what results can be obtained through themare cultivating, with the collaboration of local indigenous families, some of the abandoned raised elds in the territory of modern-day Bolivia. The results of these experiments are astounding. The complexity of social organization required for this kind of land exploitation is surprisingly low. This means it is within the reach of family groups, neighbors, or traditional Andean communities of the ayllus kind (Erickson 1992, 291). It has been found, besides, that the intensity of the work required for this kind of agricultural technique is only a little higher than that needed for the practice of other traditional cultivation methods in the region. Yet the most important result of the investigations now under way is that raised elds have proved to be a highly productive, efcient, and cheap form of cultivation. These conclusions contest the general opinion among Occidental agronomy and economics experts that so-called traditional agricultural systems are backward, primitive, and antieconomic. The raised elds method has proven to be efcient, even if we judge its results against capitalist standards. Traditionally, intensive agriculture has been associated with state organization of labor, becauseso the hypothesis goesdensely populated societies are supposed to require the application of a systematic type of land exploitation. However, these experiments suggest that the association between intensive agriculture and state bureaucracy does not imply a cause-effect nexus (Erickson 1993, 374). Another consequence of these experiments is, then, to allow us to see prehistoric indigenous cultures previous to the great Andean states in a different light. They remind us of

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something we often forget: the so-called primitive peoples not only knew very well what they were doing, but also are able to teach us, twentiethcentury Occidental subjects, a few useful things. The investigations that I have been describing resort to archaeological knowledge, to fossilized human activities that help us question the way in which we view, nowadays, the space we inhabit. Our geographic and discursive gaze is a Western device that has traditionally served the project of colonization of the American territory by European nations.16 In this context, the New World has been customarily represented, according to Frederick Turner, as a savage land. That is, it has been depicted as something to be controlled or domesticated. This Western hostility to the American landscapean animus at the foundation of the literate city studied by Angel Rama (1984)manifests itself as an overestimation of the globalizing gaze of the geographer, insofar as it is opposed to the indigenous chorographic knowledge of the space that constitutes human habitats (Boelhower 1987, 5051). This colonial perspective still dominates our way of imagining the space we inhabit, and its survival is possible thanks to the metaphor of the blank page that erases from our imaginary any trace of spatial or territorial practices of non-European origin. The dehistoricization of the territory and its dehumanization leave an imprint in our cognitive format, in our culture, and in our episteme. One of the possible ways to combat this situation is to open interstices in our imaginary that allow us, once and for all, not only to acknowledge the territorial practices that took place before the arrival of the European subject, but also to acknowledge the presence and currency they still have in our present landscape. The perspective offered by this kind of study of the indigenous past may seem, to some, related to a postcolonial theoretical framework. And that may indeed be the case: it all depends on what denition of postcolonial studies one is thinking of. For instance, Mignolo has tried, in some of his articles, to suggest connections between the Latin American colonial studies agenda and the postcolonial theory corpus. The way in which he has managed to relate both disciplinary endeavors is by elaborating on the notion of a postcolonial reason, which he denes as comprising all those social actions, from writing to social movements, that left their mark in history by contesting colonial domination (e.g., in Latin America, from Guaman Poma to Kattari in the Colonial Andes) and by looking for alternative ways of thinking and living (Mignolo 1994a, 66). In a similar vein, Sara Castro-Klarn (1999) has also been an advocate of a critical

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dialogue between both elds of study. She claims, while studying Inca Garcilaso as a postcolonial critic avant la lettrefollowing Bill Aschcroft, Gareth Grifths, and Helen Tifn (1989)that the postcolonial condition is not a post-independence phenomenon but rather an effect of the imperial process from the moment of colonization to this day (14546). In this framework, it seems, any critique of the colonial regimeeven those that take place under colonial situationscan be considered postcolonial. According to Castro-Klarn, in order to be able to talk about postcolonial thinking in Latin America, it is necessary to provide a denition of modernity that would take into account the role Latin America had in it (146). She nds that denition in Enrique Dussels work, especially in El encubrimiento del Otro (1994), where the Argentine philosopher traces the origins of what he calls the myth of modernity back to the sixteenth century and the colonization of America. That myth was based on, among other things, the concealment of any contribution America and its inhabitants may have made to humankind. In other words, what Dussel is saying is that modernity developed at the same time it occluded the rationality of its American Other, thus refusing to acknowledge not only the Others knowledge, but also its own knowledge of the knowledge of the Other. In view of this grim genealogy, Dussels project proposes to salvage reason and modernity through the destruction of the opposition between Self and Other as constitutive of the process of identity construction.17 As Castro-Klarn (1999, 149) points out, one of the consequences of this kind of theorization is that it forces us to acknowledge the inuence of non-Western cultures in the formation of the Occidental subject. I believe that the representation of human activities in the territory I am proposing that is, as a long chain of which we, present-day dwellers, are only a link is a step toward the completion of some of the goals Castro-Klarn sees in Dussels agenda. If we view our role in the territory as I suggest, we will be more aware of the fact that our present is informed by works and past activities produced by other humans who were not part of Western civilization. This acknowledgment will also help us represent ourselves in a less arrogant way that admits that not only our historic but also our prehistoric Others played an important role in our process of becoming what we are. For that prehistoric landscape they modied, so different from the one we inhabit, is, somewhat, part of the latter. It is part of our present if we conceive it from a diachronic perspective that understands the landscape as an evolving entity that is transformed by the intervention of human activities. The materiality of those marks, of those scars and

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mutations we see in the landscape, reminds us that some of them were produced by human beings, that a group of them operated on the territory before usthat is to say, that other human beings lived here and left a legacy. To incorporate those marks into our imaginary is a way, I believe, to make the Amerindian part of our cognitive horizonit is a way, also, to incorporate that Amerindian into the present, not just as our object of study but as our equal. This acknowledgment of the Other in our quotidian life (that is, the participation of the Other in our present) can be, perhaps, an antidote against the denial of coevalness Johannes Fabian (1983) describes, through which we put distance between the aborigine (understood as an object of study who lives in a state of evolution different from, or inferior to, ours) and us in our role of observers. A research endeavor that attempts to obtain a better knowledge of indigenous historic and prehistoric pasts runs the risk of becoming the task of an antiquarian. And this may end up happening if the scholar loses sight of the horizon of the colonial situation whose legacies we are undergoing in the present. The knowledge we produce does not mean anything if we do not try to make it work in our present, if we do not attempt to help change the effect of the aforementioned colonial legacies. That is why we should try to make academic knowledge available to the public, in order to make an impact on the representation of indigenous subjects by the educational system (through changes in the versions offered by textbooks at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels) as well as by other state ideological apparatuses. This plan of action supplements, in my opinion, the Latin American subaltern studies call for solidarity with the academicians Others (see Rabasa and Sanjins 1994, x). Moreover, a research agenda that focuses on the recovery of prehistoric and historic indigenous material activities in the land (that is, a recovery of precolonial lore) may also have, in other respects, some interest for those who subscribe toor view with sympathya subaltern studies agenda. It is my contention that it is important to know who the producers of knowledge are and where they come from. Otherwise, their academic practices may lose sight of some important facts. One of them is that these scholars are part of the teaching machine that produces and reproduces subalternity. As John Beverley has pointed out repeatedly (for example, 1993, x; 1999, 1), literary studies and other humanistic disciplines have contributed to the promotion and perpetuation of domination of subaltern subjects in both Latin America and the rest of the world. It should also be

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pointed out that scholars are, from a diachronic perspective, a product of the historical events that also produced the very situations of subalternity they are studying. That is why it is necessary not only to revise the theoretical tools we bring to the analysis of our object of study, but also to permanently question our role as practitioners of a discipline that has traditionally been at the service of the dominant ideologythat is, at the service of the values and practices of the dominant groups. We must be aware, then, not only of the legacies we inherit from the modication of the American land by European subjects that resulted in an erasure of indigenous traces in both the territory and Western thought, but alsoand especiallyof the reservoir of representations of indigenous culture that inform the processes that produce us, academics, as subjects. Those processes of subject construction affect all of us, regardless of ethnic or national origin, who produce our research in Western languages and in the framework provided by the Western academy. Having said that, I still believe that an agenda that purports to show some kind of solidarity with the repressed Others of the West is possible. If we are aware of the legacies of Western modernity that limit our capacity to offer our solidarity to the oppressed, we will be more likely to avoid them. Let me nish this article with an example that illustrates how solidarity with the marginalized may come from the very site that produces the oppression of the Other or the subaltern: institutionalized Western knowledge itself. In 1982, the government of Guyana used Western mapsan always effective and trustworthy tool for dominationto reduce the local Amerindians holdings around their villages. To make things worse, mining and logging activities threatened the livelihood of the indigenous communities who live in the upper Mazaruni River. The Amerindians, of course, looked for help. Interestingly, they found it in their longtime enemy: Western cartography. An organization called Local Earth Observation provided the Amerindians of the region with handheld GPS (global positioning system) units, through which they located and named more than four thousand shing sites, hunting areas, and other territorial landmarks. With all that information, produced by an unusual combination of ancestral indigenous chorographic lore and up-to-date Western cartographic technology, they made a comprehensive map of the region they exploit for their livelihood. Their legal claims are now based on that map.18 This recent case shows that a solidarity with the oppressed is possible for subjects trained in Western knowledge. It also shows that the technology that was once used against subaltern subjects can be put to work

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in their favorthat is, to put cartography at the service of chorography and not the other way around, as in the case of the Relaciones geogrcas. For those of us who work in the humanities, it is not easy to provide advanced technology such as GPS, but we can nd other means to show our solidarity. In the case of research projects that focus on cultures that no longer exist as suchfor example, those from the northern shore of the Ro de la Platato devise a strategy for solidarity with indigenous peoples is, obviously, a much more difcult task. However, it is my contention that even for humanists who study geographic areas where indigenous cultures do not exist at present, there are some things to do. One of them is to embrace the cause of the Amerindians beyond modern-day national and geographic boundaries. Another oneprobably the most easily available strategy for humanistsis to go beyond an academic agenda that dislocates oppressive epistemologies by attempting an intervention on the rst stages (primary and secondary) of the educational systemboth at a national and international level. As I mentioned earlier, Latin American colonial studies scholars should try to change the ways in which indigenous peoples are represented today by state apparatusesmainly in the primary and secondary levels of educationand the media. Such a strategy would, as in the case of the GPS, put a Western tool for dominationthe academyat the service of its traditional victims. Changing the way in which modern nations construct their pasts may seem a very modest goal, but it is, at least, a way of changing the foundations of those national narratives that sometimes distort or dismiss the role of indigenous peoples in the construction of modernity and national identity. A recovery of both their agency in the territory and the materiality of their culture from the prehistory to the present may help change the effects of the colonial legacies that render them insignicant to national narratives. Then again, there are many other possible ways to show solidarity with subaltern subjects, as the alliance between indigenous territorial knowledge and Western academics in Guyana shows. We just need to develop an agenda for the intervention of scholars of Latin American colonial studies that goes beyond the boundaries of the academy. If what characterizes a culture is, as Turner (1994, xxi) would have it, a special relation with the land where it develops, it is plausible that the way in which we live and think can be seriously affected by the way in which we imagine the territory. If we ignore the traces left by other human beings on the land we inhabit, we will have a distorted view of the ground on which we stand and we will ignore that we are living on a palimpsest

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that, modestlyand perhaps inadvertentlywe are contributing to enrich. I recently concluded an article (Verdesio 1999) by referring to my personal experience with territorial indigenous traces for a period of four years (that ended in May 1999, the date on which I left my position at Louisiana State University). During those years, I used to walk several times a week, before or after my classes at Prescott Hall, across the parking lot called Indian Mounds. The name, predictably, refers to two articial elevations made by prehistoric human beings. On their surfaces and in the surrounding area, students perform all kinds of activities: they drink a soda, have lunch, or simply talk to each other. The many quotidian, sometimes noisy activities performed by students on the mounds are in contrast to the silence those structures have kept, for our Occidental imaginary, for thousands of years (ve, to be more exact). However, it is possible to attempt to make those mounds speak through an archaeological inquiry. We will not be able, of course, to have a true conversation with the site, but it will be possible, at least, to be certain of one thing: in the same space we inhabit, hundreds of years ago, generations of human beings that we insist on forgetting performed a series of activities of which only a few (the building of the mounds, for example) are known to us. We do not know much about the other activities they performed on that site, but it is clear that they modied the landscape, that they lived there. The material consequences of those activities for our current habitat are not only visible but also, as the playful LSU students on the mounds show, usable. If we are capable of using the material legacies of indigenous peoples from the past, we should be also capable of acknowledging their contributions to the present.

Notes
Small fragments from Verdesio 1999 appear in this essay. 1. I am using the expression colonial situations in the sense given to it by Walter Mignolo (1989b, 1994): the situation in which an ethnic minority, technologically advanced and practicing Christian religion, imposed itself on an ethnic majority, technologically less advanced and practicing non-Christian religions. Colonial situations are shaped by a process of transformation in which members of both the colonized and the colonizing cultures enter into a particular kind of human interaction, colonial semiosis, which, in turn, contributes to the conformation of the colonial situation. 2. One exception to this rule is Alvaro F. Bolaoss (1994) book on the Pijao Indians.

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3. Although the term prehistoric has Occidental overtonesbecause it suggests that the advent of writing seems to start a new historical timeit is the most widely used one in archaeology and historiography when it comes to referring to remote times in the Americas. I will use the quotes, then, to signal my awareness of the limitations of the term. 4. There is a growing number of ethnohistoric works that account for indigenous cultures outside the Inca, Maya, or Mexica traditions. In the case of the Andes to mention just one of the major areasthe books by Sabine MacCormack (1991), Karen Spalding (1984), Steve Stern (1982), and, especially, John Murra (1980)whose fundamental studies on economic Andean systems have contributed to a better understanding of the regionare good examples of this. However, excellent investigations like theseand others with a similar approachdo not abound in the area of Latin American colonial studies of literary or cultural studies afliation. 5. Azara was a very respected Spanish naturalist whose texts are fundamental for the study of nature in the region by the end of the eighteenth century. 6. For a study of some of those testimonies by travelers, see the last chapter of Verdesio 2001a. 7. Sociologists talk, in general, about white settler colonies; ecologists (like Alfred Crosby [1996]) prefer the term New Europes. 8. For a discussion of those changes, see Crosby 1972 and 1996 and Verdesio 2001b. 9. For a more comprehensive study of the Relaciones geogrcas, understood as complex semiotic artifacts, see Mignolo 1990, 1989b, 1994b; and Mundy 1996. 10. Woods inspiration comes from the ideas by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1987, 7580) on the relationship between life forms and their environment. He nds support for his arguments in the pages that describe structural coupling. 11. Unfortunately, the rest of Kuschs research focuses only on the recovery of indigenous thought, forgetting about the broader project I have just described. 12. For a brief summary of the history of the studies on mounds found on Uruguayan territory, see, among others, Bracco 1992, 44; Lpez Mazz and Bracco 1991, 46. 13. Those excavations have interested the general public for the rst time, as the 1996 media coverage of the excavations suggests (they were given a prime-time spot on an important TV station). 14. In a previous report, archaeologists had advanced the opposite hypothesis (of an egalitarian society), based on the mortuary-associated material (polished stones, bones, fangs, and shell collars, among other objects) in the interments under study (Femenas et al. 1990, 352). According to Joseph Tainter (1978,

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107), treatment of the dead in a differential way indicates the existence of hierarchies in social stratication. Ritualunderstood as a communication systemaccording to the same author, reveals information about the status of the dead subject (113). 15. The use of mounds for funeral functions by Amerindians of historical time may be a mere coincidence, but it might also be the consequence of imitative or transculturated behavior. About the bichaderos little is known besides the use of them that documents attribute to the Charruafor example, it is not known whether the little stone pyramids were built by the Charrua or by another ethnic group. For information about the bichaderos that have been localized and their structure, see Femenas 1983. 16. On the imperial role of cartography as an ancillary science for the geographic gaze, see Harley 1988, 282; 1990, 24. 17. Mignolo (1994a, 64), inspired by the same idea (the recognition of the contribution of subaltern groups to humankind), has talked about the need to relocate languages, peoples, and cultures in order conceive of the civilizing process as the triumphal march of the human species, of a variety of civilizing processes, and not just the global spread of European/Western civilizations under the banner of progress, civility and development. 18. A report on these mapping activities can be found in Carroll 2000.

References
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Castro-Klarn, Sara. 1999. Mimicry Revisited: Latin America, Post-Colonial Theory, and the Location of Knowledge. In El debate de la postcolonialidad en Latinoamrica: Una postmodernidad perifrica o cambio de paradigma en el pensamiento latinoamericano, ed. Alfonso de Toro and Fernando de Toro. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert. Cronon, William. 1995. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang. Crosby, Alfred W. 1972. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood. . 1996. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 9001900. New York: Cambridge University Press. Darwin, Charles. 1989. Voyage of the Beagle. London: Penguin. Dussel, Enrique. 1994. El encubrimiento del otro: Hacia el origen del mito de la modernidad. Quito: ABYA-YALA. Erickson, Clark. 1992. Prehistoric Landscape Management in the Andean Highlands: Raised Field Agriculture and Its Environmental Impact. Population and Environment 13.4: 285300. . 1993. The Social Organization of Prehispanic Raised Field Agriculture in the Lake Titicaca Basin. In supplement 7 of Economic Aspects of Water Management in the Prehispanic New World: Research in Economic Anthropology, ed. Vernon Scarborough and Barry Isaac. Greenwich, CT: Jai. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Femenas, Jorge. 1983. Amontonamientos articiales de piedras en cerros y elevaciones de nuestro territorio. Revista antropolgica 1.1: 1316. Femenas, Jorge, et al. 1990. Tipos de enterramiento en estructuras monticulares (cerritos) en la regin de la cuenca de la Laguna Mern (R.O.U.). Revista do CEPA 17.20: 34556. Gerbi, Antonello. 1992. La naturaleza de las Indias Nuevas. Translated by Antonio Alatorre. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica. . 1993. La disputa del Nuevo Mundo: Historia de una polmica, 17501900. Translated by Antonio Alatorre. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica. Harley, J. B. 1988. Maps, Knowledge, and Power. In The Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1990. Maps and the Columbian Encounter. Milwaukee: Golda Meir Library. Kusch, Rodolfo. 1976. Geocultura del hombre americano. Buenos Aires: Fernando Garca Cambeiro. . 1977. El pensamiento indgena y popular en Amrica. Buenos Aires: Hachette.

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