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Recent archaeological field work in Tacna (Peru) has investigated the long-term landscape history of the Sama Valley. Located between the research hotspots of Moquegua and Arica, the valley has long been overlooked. At the same time, it is well positioned to offer new insights into debates about mobility, environment, and the transforming political economies of the Late Prehispanic and historic periods. This article presents an initial analysis of recent data on the long-term patterns of connectivity that articulated the Sama drainage with neighboring valleys and wider networks. Based on a combination of remote sensing and intensive pedestrian survey data, it is possible to trace multiple routes through the inter-valley desert pampas that border the middle and lower Sama Valley. The results highlight the utility of intensive survey methods in marginal intervalley landscapes and reveal a complex palimpsest of routes and ephemeral sites relating to regional and inter-regional mobility during the Late Prehispanic and historical periods.

Resumen: Recent archaeological field work in Tacna (Peru) has investigated the long-term landscape history of the Sama Valley. Located between the research hotspots of Moquegua and Arica, the valley has long been overlooked. At the same time, it is well positioned to offer new insights into debates about mobility, environment, and the transforming political economies of the Late Prehispanic and historic periods. This article presents an initial analysis of recent data on the long-term patterns of connectivity that articulated the Sama drainage with neighboring valleys and wider networks. Based on a combination of remote sensing and intensive pedestrian survey data, it is possible to trace multiple routes through the inter-valley desert pampas that border the middle and lower Sama Valley. The results highlight the utility of intensive survey methods in marginal intervalley landscapes and reveal a complex palimpsest of routes and ephemeral sites relating to regional and inter-regional mobility during the Late Prehispanic and historical periods.

Animals were central elements in many early state political economies. Yet the roles of livestock in building and financing the state generally remain under-theorized, particularly in comparison with other major elements such as crop intensification and bureaucratic technologies. We compare the political economies of two highly centralized and expansive states—the Inca in the central Andes and Ur III in southern Mesopotamia—through a deliberately animal-focused perspective that draws attention to the unique social and economic roles of the livestock that underpinned both imperial financing and household resilience. Despite important differences in the trajectories of the two case studies, attention to the roles played by animals in early states highlights several underlying dynamics of broader interest including the translation between modes of production and accumulation, the interplay between animal-based mobilities and territorial integration, and the functions of livestock in state regimes of value and political subjectivity.

The early colonial period witnessed new scales of connectivity and unprecedented projects of resource extraction across the Spanish Americas. Yet such transformations also drew heavily on preexisting Indigenous landscapes, technologies, and institutions. Drawing together recent discussions in archaeology and geography about mobility and resource materialities, this article takes the early colonial route as a central object of investigation and contributes to new emerging interpretive frameworks that make sense of Spanish colonialism in the Americas as a variable, large-scale, and materially constituted process. Using three case studies—the ruta de Colón on the island of Hispaniola, the routes connecting the southeastern Caribbean islands with mainland South America, and the ruta de la plata in the south-central Andes—we develop a comparative archaeological analysis that reveals divergent trajectories of persistence, appropriation, and erasure in the region's routes and regimes of extraction and mobility during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Long acknowledged as an important component of Inka infrastructure, the tambo or imperial way station has had surprisingly little synthetic treatment in the archaeological and ethnohistorical literatures. The post-conquest trajectory of the tambo as a colonial and later Republican institution is even less known, despite its important role in tying together the fractured geography of the central Andes. In seeking to address this exclusion, this dissertation aims to offer an explicitly transconquest and multidisciplinary perspective on one of the Inka Empire’s most long-lived institutions. It also provides an insightful case study into the possibilities and challenges of investigating the afterlives of imperial infrastructures and the opportunities they offered for subsequent political and economic projects. The dissertation draws on the Tambos de Palca Archaeological Project in the highlands of Tacna (far southern Peru), which surveyed one of the landscapes that would come to form the ruta de la plata (‘silver road’) between the great silver mines of Potosí and the Spanish Pacific. Focusing on one of the key forms of infrastructural investment in the Andes – the tambos or way stations that were first established along the Inka highways – the project explored the history of this institution in the region before and after the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century. Using a combination of techniques (remote sensing, GIS, pedestrian survey, targeted excavation, and archival research) to trace the historical continuities and transformations of the tambos along this high-altitude route, the dissertation explores these sites as a window into how the Inka infrastructural legacy and traditional indigenous mobilities articulated with the rise of new mercantile networks and the dynamics of global commodity booms during the past five centuries. As such, the research aims to inform ongoing scholarly efforts to bridge persistent disciplinary gaps between historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists interested in the early modern period in the Andes.