Disentangling the Archaeology of Colonialism and Indigeneity

This chapter outlines a theoretical framework with which to situate objects such as coins within Andes' wider colonial context through drawing on the emergent entanglement perspective and postcolonial material culture studies. It considers the multiple scales at which coins, colonial subjects, and other actors found themselves increasingly interdependent as the Peruvian viceroyalty began to stabilize by using archaeological, historical, and modern ethnographic sources. The chapter explores the ways in which these bodies of evidence complicate existing historical understandings of the processes of colonial change in the Andes. Monetization, as a process that entangled indigenous and Spanish communities, has ties to both pre-contact pasts and 'postcolonial' futures. By tracing the sociomaterial linkages and disjunctives through the colonial project, a historical anthropology of entanglement can potentially provide an important wider context for understanding the complex regional dependences and dependencies that continue to unfold.