Mapping Conquest: A Spatial History of Indigenous Peru during the Spanish Invasion (ca. 1528-1537)

This dissertation asks: what role did indigenous actors play in the Spanish 'conquest' of Peru and how were these foreign invasions affected by local indigenous history and geography? To answer these questions, this work combines ethnohistorical, digital history, and geospatial methodologies to retell the story of the Spanish invasion of Peru (and of European conquests of indigenous societies more generally). This study integrates these methods---as well as lessons from similar fields such as literary geography and Historical GIS---by applying a two-step methodology that a) deconstructs colonial texts and their narratives, and b) reconstructs the role of previously erased or marginalized indigenous people, places, institutions, and histories.;For the conquest of Peru, the resulting analysis contributes to other scholarship examining the key role of indigenous allies and auxiliaries in shaping the events of the conquest era. For example, since the 1970s, Peruvian ethnohistorians have been active identifying, publishing, and analyzing a wide variety of ethnohistorical sources on the late pre-contact and early post-contact era. This project demonstrates the potential of new methodologies to wring new insights out of these and other sources.;This dissertation makes five principal arguments. First, the Spanish conquest of Peru was an indigenous affair. Andeans invited, guided, accompanied, and fought alongside the Spanish conquistadors in the invasion of Peru. They did so, not as passive subordinates to Spanish dominance, but as political actors pursuing their own agendas. Second, Andean geographies, not just people, aided the Spanish invasion. These geographies include a sophisticated road system designed to facilitate imperial expansion, the politically fractious landscape that emerged out of the Inka Civil War, and a "geography of destruction" resulting from the damage done by this war. Third, diplomacy was as important as violence in enabling Spanish political gains in the Andes. Fourth, viewed from an Andean perspective, the "Spanish conquest" of Peru appeared to be something else entirely. To the Wankas and other ethnic groups, it was a chance to overthrow their current imperial overlords: the Quitan faction of Inkas. To the Cusco Inkas, it was an opportunity to reverse a war lost. Fifth, and finally, this dissertation argues the subsequent demographic decline in the Andes cannot be explained by direct violence and disease alone. Rather, Andean communities suffered much more greatly as the result of indirect violence. This indirect violence includes violence re-projected by Andean communities against each other and structural violence. Structural violence refer to communities' inability to meet their own needs as the result of economic/ecological disruption, geographic dislocation, oppressive and cruel labor requirements, and the destruction of Andean institutions and infrastructure.;None of these arguments by themselves are entirely new. Instead, the primary contribution of this dissertation is in the way it recovers indigenous agency and activity, which are central to all of these arguments. Whereas previous studies are more anecdotal in nature, providing examples here or there of different moments in which the study of indigenous activity challenges traditional narratives of conquest, this project seeks to systematically reconstruct such activity, thus showing its ubiquity and importance at every important juncture of the period. In doing so, it re-examines the following events: the Inka imperial geography (Ch. 2) and civil war (begun ca. 1528; Ch. 3) which made foreign invasion possible, the encounter at Cajamarca (1532; Ch. 4), a much-overlooked series of diplomatic negotiations between the conquistadors and Andean nobility (1532--33; Ch. 5), and the initial invasion of the Inka heartland as manifested by the march of Francisco Pizarro, his fellow conquistadors, and massive numbers of auxiliaries and slaves from Cajamarca to Cusco (1533; Ch. 6 and 7). Finally, it concludes with a brief review of Manqo Inka's war against the conquistadors and an examination of the vulnerability of the nascent colony in 1536 and 37 and its continued dependence on Andean aid and allies (Ch. 8).