What are Borderlands?
From Hadrian’s Wall to the US-Mexico border, borderlands are places where cultures, peoples, and polities collide. Such collisions can often be as violent as they are profitable, creating landscapes filled with both opportunity and danger that frontier communities and incoming polities must learn to navigate and manage. One of my principal research interests has been investigating and understanding the processes that shape these borderlands while shedding light on the often-forgotten stories of the communities who call them home.
What is the Chaupiyunga?
With roots in the Andean highland indigenous language of Quechua, the etymology of the word chaupiyunga is revealing of the liminal positioning – between the highlands and the coast – of the region and the people it describes. The prefix chaupi- refers to something being “in between” or in the “middle” while the term yungas is often used to refer to the hot or warm lands west of the cordillera and/or the people who inhabited such lands. Though not all the groups who have lived in the chaupiyungas may have explicitly identified with the term, it remains a useful and locally rooted way to situate their shared borderland experiences.
Why the Chaupiyunga of the Moche Valley?
Of the many chaupiyungas of the Andes, the Moche Valley chaupiyunga has uniquely fascinating histories of migration, conflict, and political expansion. This landscape saw myriad individuals and groups vie for control over its slopes: from early highland colonists to coastal lords of the Kingdom of Chimor. These agents and groups were doubtlessly motivated by an invaluable resource that could be grown in abundance in chaupiyunga fields: coca. The importance of the coca plant permeates every layer of Andean life. The plant was – and still is – employed from the day-to-day experiences of farmers to larger-scale obligations of reciprocity between communities and lords, ancestors, and deities. Even so, coca was only one of many motivators for the various groups who struggled to tame the chaupiyunga landscape of the Moche Valley over the millennia.
PARFAM 2017-2018 and Subsequent Research
As the Principal Investigator of the Proyecto Arqueológico Reconocimiento de la Frontera Alto Moche (PARFAM) from 2017 to 2018, I conducted a full-coverage hybrid pedestrian and drone survey of around 40 square kilometers of the Moche Valley chaupiyunga. This project was funded by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DDIG #1719283) and implemented with a team of American and Peruvian students and archaeologists as well as with Lic. Elvis Monzon as the Peruvian Director. Our fieldwork uncovered nearly four thousand years of borderland histories in the Moche Valley chaupiyungas: from monumental temples articulating unions between distant ancestors and gods to hilltop fortresses built at the contested boundary of warring empires. As a Junior Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections from 2018 to 2019, I also expanded upon my fieldwork data to include a novel synthesis of legacy archaeological survey data as well as archival research on colonial documentation.
Legacies in the Landscape
These efforts eventually culminated in my doctoral dissertation: Legacies in the Landscape: Borderland Processes in the Upper Moche Valley Chaupiyunga of Peru. My dissertation combined my various data sources with a suite of visual and spatial GIS analyses to articulate how coastal, highland, and chaupiyunga peoples and polities interacted with each other and became entangled with certain places over time in the Moche Valley. I found that incoming polities and local communities alike utilized several strategies – spatial and visual tethering, becoming exchange brokers, expanding cultivation, and fortifying their settlements – to bind themselves to the chaupiyunga landscape. Such bonds left physical legacies in this landscape – ranging from temples to fortresses – that were often used by future generations to secure their sovereignty. Even so, these same legacies could be co-opted by incoming polities to control contemporary populations by dominating their pasts.
The Modern Chaupiyunga
The modern communities and families who call the Moche Valley chaupiyunga their home continue to inhabit a borderland. This landscape witnessed centuries of Spanish authority, the political consolidation of the Viceroyalty of Peru, and the many iterations of the sovereign polity that would grow into the modern Republic of Peru. The historical processes bundled into these centuries shaped this chaupiyunga landscape: the boundaries within it shifting and changing with new regimes, technologies, and traditions. My future work in the chaupiyungas will focus on investigating these more modern stories and experiences of living in borderlands, specifically within the Distrito de Poroto.
