Mya Welch
Research Mentor(s): Anne Creighton
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Anthropology
Presentation Date: 08/03/2022
Presentation Type: Oral presentation
Poster Number:
Session: Session II: 1:30 – 2:20pm
Room: Vandenberg
Authors: Mya Welch, Anne Marie Creighton
Abstract
By analyzing the census data from the early 17th century Colca Valley, this project aims to investigate the ways in which age and physical differences affected how people used their land. The Colca Valley, a gorge in southern Peru, had extreme changes in elevation, so arable land in this area was rare. After the Spanish conquest of the region in the 16th century, they conducted detailed censuses called “visitas,” which recorded various demographic information about people, as well as information about their family relationships, properties owned, and social affiliations. These represent one of the longest series of post-colonial censuses for any locality in the New World (Wernke, 2013). In these visitas, we can see that among the class of people categorized as “Elderly & Infirm,” many individuals still owned plots of land. This begs the question, how are the people least likely to be able to perform intensive agricultural work able to effectively utilize their fields? What accommodations are made by them and their communities to make those fields as productive and accessible as possible? By using information from the visitas that has been compiled into a database, we can pick out the most relevant information, find patterns, and draw comparisons between people of different ages and social groups, such as whether elderly people tended to own less land than young and middle-aged adults. (Insert findings here?) Considering how elderly and infirm people who owned land were able to effectively utilize it when good farmland was limited in the Andes can give significant insight into how land was used on both individual and community scales, and can display important information about the day-to-day lives of these people and communities.
