Matthew Drutis
Pronouns: he/him
Research Mentor(s): Bruce Mannheim
Co-Presenter:
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Anthropology / LSA
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Session 3 – 1:40pm – 2:30 pm
Room: League Ballroom
Authors: Matthew Drutis, Anne Marie Creighton, Bruce Mannheim
Presenter: 64
Abstract
Scholars have used archeological research and the limited documents about the indigenous people of the Colca region in southern Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to create a vast body of research about their lives and society. Because the historical documents don’t explicitly address the languages Colca’s people spoke, however, uncovering more about the movements of people who spoke Quechua, Aymara, and specifically Puquina could revitalize those documents and lead to new discoveries. This project analyzes Colca region census data, which includes details such as family information, kin, and property ownership, because they provide the most insight into indigenous multilingualism when compared to the census data from other nearby regions. First we need to construct a list of fifteen to thirty diagnostic words that could be found as the names of people or places and that are distinctively Puquina. We are expecting to find many Puquina people and place names, which we can compare with our diagnostic list through queries in Microsoft Access. The queries will gather data on the occurrences of gender, crop types, moiety, and village. If a systematic method is developed, it could be used in other parts of the world where oppressive governments are removing or pushing back against indigenous people. Learning more about the indigenous population in this way could prove to be an interesting tool.
Arts and Humanities, Interdisciplinary, Social Sciences
