Villages at the Crossroads: Inka and Spanish Imperialism, Local Negotiation, and Emerging <i>Reducción</i> Landscapes in Early Colonial Jauja, Peru

Abstract This essay joins a wave of innovative studies about the reducción general de los indios, a watershed moment in the history of Spanish colonialism in the Andes, by bringing the Jauja Valley into the conversation. Using a combined methodology of deep archival research and intensive field-walking archaeological surveys associated with the early reducciones, the article shows that, within a single valley and in response to local conditions, historical actors gradually applied two different solutions to the problem of resettlement and concentration, generating two distinct reducción landscapes. One required reusing previous settlements, the other, building in unoccupied spaces that nevertheless were linked to roads, bridges, way stations, and Indigenous forms of social organization. Thus, reducciones were both an old and a new phenomenon in the valley. In the central and southern portions, planned settlements stemmed from older pueblos, thus showing that most reducciones there were not created completely ex nihilo, as is often assumed. In the northern portion, ayllus were forced to resettle into novel emplacements. However, the two main ethnic groups in that area largely shaped how the reducción was carried out in their territory, managing to preserve critical ethnic boundaries and a degree of control over the Inka and early colonial vial infrastructure.