The domestic architecture and material culture of colonial Cuenca, Ecuador, A.D. 1600-1800

The Spanish colonial city of Cuenca, in what is now Ecuador, was founded on the ruins of the Inkaic centre of Tumipampa in 1557. This study is a multi-disciplinary effort to examine the material culture of domestic contexts in Cuenca and its environs for the period from 1600-1800 AD through architectural survey, archaeological excavations, and documentary research. Five urban and three rural standing houses believed to date to the late eighteenth century were mapped and drawn in detail in order to reconstruct their colonial configuration, and two rural and two urban colonial houses were test-pitted archaeologically. This material was then compared to contemporary property descriptions and household inventories held in the notarial archives of the Archivo Nacional de Historia, Seccion del Azuay in Cuenca. This study reveals the intimate relationship between architecture and material culture in both reflecting and helping to create the colonial ideology of the inhabitants of Cuenca. The domestic world of the family and the public world of the formal colonial economy were not clearly separated in the system of merchant capitalism which existed in the colonial Andes, and thus the configuration of domestic space and the social signaling of the material culture contained within it was an essential part of the maintenance of hegemonic relationships between the members of different economic classes and ethnic groups in Cuenca throughout its development as a colonial urban centre.