Against Conservation: Towards a New Model of Archaeological Heritage Management in Chinchero

ABSTRACT

In the Peruvian Highland town of Chinchero, mainstream heritage conservation policies have proven to be at odds with vernacular practices of land management and uses of the material past. The temporal regimes involved in the strict conservation paradigm collide with local understandings of time and history, rooted in a dynamic tradition based on principles of alternation and circulation, and with a utilitarian approach towards ancient physical remains. The consequences of current archaeological management have turned the Inca ruins into a highly regulated space from which community members have been largely dispossessed. This goes against the legal consideration of the site as a cultural landscape. In order to remedy the temporal and spatial disjunctions derived from mainstream archaeological policy at the site, a new model, inspired in traditional landscape practices, local ideas of time, and movement patterns is proposed as a critical counternarrative to a global hegemonic conservation paradigm. For this purpose, two specific practices come into scrutiny where Andean temporalities as forms of knowledge are embedded. One is Muyuy, a long-standing principle of socioeconomic organization by which communal land is periodically rotated and worked. The other one is Linderaje, or the ancient custom of walking around community boundaries while honoring the milestones identified with the ancestors. Both are proposed as a solution to current conservation dilemmas in town.

KEYWORDS:

• Andes
• Inca ruins
• heritage conservation
• cultural landscapes
• Muyuy
• temporalities
• landscape practices
• archaeological sites

Introduction

This paper is concerned with the effects of archaeological conservation policies in the Peruvian highland town of Chinchero, with regard to the historical relations between the villagers and their pre-Hispanic legacy. It presents a twofold argument. The first is that restrictive and static mainstream conservation practice has separated the residents from their pre-Hispanic archaeological heritage. Local heritage values in town are strongly linked to issues of sovereignty and jurisdiction. In this way no heritage makes sense without the recognition of territorial rights and associated social practice. Therefore, the dispossession that followed the conversion of Chinchero Inca ruins into a single heritage site should be contextualized within a long history of colonization of Indigenous peoples in Peru. The second, intertwined, argument, posits the inadequacy of dominant archaeological management regimes to account for: (a) local notions of time and uses of space; (b) local values anchored in a different relationship with the material past. Such values are informed more by practical and quotidian rationales of use and habitation than by historical or artistic significance, as understood in Western heritage discourse. It is postulated that a possible way forward to bridge the culture–nature divide inherent to archaeological conservation is the reintroduction to the ruins of customary landscape practices. These practices are imbued with dynamic temporalities of rotation, alternation, and seasonality. As a corollary to the argumentation, a tentative proposal for an alternative management of the site that arises out of the previous discussion is put forward.

Outlined in these terms, the paper intersects and dialogs with an important body of literature that takes a critical approach to dominant archaeological practices, epistemologies and temporalities (Asensio 2019; Attwood and Arnold 1992; Byrne 1991; Haber 1999; Meskell 2002; Smith 2006; Smith and Wobst 2005; Tantaleán and Aguilar 2012) and contests the consequences of the heritagization of Indigenous cultures and landscapes worldwide (Birckhead et al. 1992; Brockwell, O’Connor, and Byrne 2013; Gnecco 2019; Gnecco and Ayala 2010; Jofré and González 2007; Silverman 2002, 2006). This literature foregrounds the discrepancy between, on the one hand, Western ontologies of heritage, still largely informed by ideas of materiality, monumentality, linear history, and a Cartesian dualism between subject and object. On the other, Indigenous ontologies grounded on a different relationship with the past as well as on more holistic (and utilitarian) approaches to the material world (Arabena 2015; Harrison 2013; Kania 2019; Novellino 2021; Santos Granero 1998). It highlights how heritage has often meant dispossession for First Nation peoples in the hands of the professionals of the past, namely archaeologists and anthropologists, among others. Their authorized discourses and related ideologies like conservation, are currently challenged in the wake of global decolonization and repatriation debates (Fforde, McKeown, and Keeler 2020; Haber 1999; Overing 2006; Pickering 2020; Rivera 2012; Smith 2004). Furthermore, this literature shows heritage as a contested field of social action, where Indigenous control over its practice, meanings and values is of paramount importance to the advancement of political agendas and to the securement of livelihoods (Hemming and Rigney 2010; Smith 2004).

This article contributes to these debates by showcasing the example of Chinchero through the analytical lenses of temporalities. A focus on temporalities is justified on the grounds that, following Fabian’s [1983] 2014 seminal work on the political manipulation of time by archaeology and anthropology to fabricate a convenient “other,” mainstream archaeological conservation in the Cuzco region of Peru colonizes the past of Indigenous peoples by reifying the Inca ruins. This reification is epitomized by a dominant monumentalist paradigm that conceptualizes contemporary pre-Hispanic ruins as monuments in a Western artistic and historic sense (see Silverman 2006). Such temporal colonization process similarly takes place through the array of associated practices like scientific research through excavation, restoration and maintenance work, as well as cultural tourism (see García 2018a). Temporalities open up a privileged venue to explore issues of power and asymmetry, underpinning the conversion of pre-Hispanic ruins in Peru into national cultural heritage. Additionally, temporalities, rather than being merely understood as how different societies use time and experience “history,” should be regarded as forms of knowledge about the world and its continuous unfolding. As such, they inform worldviews that in turn enact particular social orders with tangible consequences for people’s lives. In other words, temporal regimes imply de facto political regimes. In the case of Chinchero, for example, the declaration of the Inca ruins as an archaeological space, severed from the present, entail the political control of archaeologists and other professionals of the past over what is going within the site’s boundaries.

Some final remarks. This research is the result of long-term, sustained ethnographic involvement in Chinchero, firmly grounded on a careful listening of the “Indigenous voice.” This reflective and bottom-up ethnography is informed by local perspectives through deep engagement with the site’s changing character. Regarding the proposal put forward in the last section, it was publicly discussed in a meeting held in Chinchero in February 2023 between the author, representatives of the Ministry of Culture, the Municipality of Chinchero, as well as presidents of the local communities. In that meeting, which was part of an ongoing collaboration between the author and the Ministry of Culture, the representatives of the communities expressed a favorable view.

Historical Overview

The Peruvian Quechua-speaking town of Chinchero is located along the circuit of the Sacred Valley of the Incas, in between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. Here are the remains of the royal estate of Topa Inca Yupanqi, son of the renowned Inca ruler Pachakuti. These ruins are among the most imposing in the Cuzco region, along with those of Pisaq, Ollantaytambo, and Machu Picchu. In addition to the ruins, Chinchero is also visited because of its celebrated pre-Hispanic textile tradition. Today the town is crammed with for profit textile centers run by women, where international and domestic tourists are educated in the ancient art of weaving through demonstrations and performance. Historically, the district of Chinchero was made up of three main ayllus, or kin-based social groups, with a strong sense of territoriality (Contreras 1976; García 2018a; Rostworoski 1970). With Spanish colonization, the ayllus reconstituted themselves and accommodated to the constraining conditions dictated by the hacienda system. This scenario, dominated by struggles for the land, dragged on during the Republican period and well into the twentieth century (García 2018a; Nair 2015). With the implementation of the 1969 national Agrarian Reform led by President Velasco Alvarado, which expropriated the haciendas and redistributed the land in the highlands, the ayllus formally became comunidades campesinas (peasant communities) with legal ownership of the land and communal land tenure in combination with more private arrangements. Starting in the 1980s, the rural town embarked on an accelerated process of urbanization, increasing interactions with the city, also introducing tourism and other modernities. Today, the epitome of such reconversion of the district into an urban zone is the contentious new Cuzco international airport being constructed in Chinchero, which will eventually replace the current one in Cuzco, deemed too small for regional development plans. One of the consequences of the airport so far has been a conspicuous move towards land privatization and speculation, as well as an ongoing process of territorial disintegration and reconfiguration (see García 2017, 2018a).

As for the Inca ruins, before becoming a “site,” they were part of the larger rural landscape of Chinchero. As such, they were an agropastoral space traversed by a number of pathways that stitched the plots of land together, or even different communities distributed along the Qhapac Ñan or ancient Andean road system. In Chinchero, this network connected the fertile Valley of Urubamba with the highlands, encouraging trade as well as exchange of peoples and goods between these two different yet complementary ecological regions. The ruins were subject to the same communal land tenure regime as in the rest of the district. Besides this, some of the main huacas, or religious shrines, were and still are located within the perimeter of the ruins, thus making this space a main setting for ritual life in town. Ritual life has been concerned with maintaining harmonious and balanced relationships between humans and the powerful other-than-human forces of an animated landscape, where traces of ancestors who created land forms in an undetermined past are still recognizable in various ways, and recorded in oral history (Abercrombie 1998). This folk history is performed during dynamic landscape events like walking, naming the land, dancing, singing, performances of ceremonial life, and so on (García 2018a). Unsurprisingly, it is concerned with histories of agriculture, and of multiple journeys through the landscape undertaken by a whole community over time.

As in other parts of the Andes and the Americas where Indigenous history is inscribed in the landscape in different ways (Abercrombie 1998; Frey 2012; Gordillo 2009), the link between the landscape and the past in Chinchero is crucial to understanding how community members have historically related to their ruins. This relationship is more in accord with pragmatic logics of recycling and circulation of materials, than to orthodox conservation practices. In these practices, the past is reified and continuities with the present are suppressed or diluted through the temporalities of conservation and restoration practices. In a sense, it is dynamic conservation that draws from traditional land management systems, informed by accentuated patterns of rotation and seasonality.

Archaeological Conservation in Chinchero: Main Issues

The critical literature on archaeological/historic conservation (Byrne 1996; Gnecco and Ayala 2010; Meskell 2002; Mills and Ferguson 1998; Silverman 2006) has exposed dilemmas of an archaeological approach to sites and historic centers that triggers temporal fractures, spatial disjunctions, and power asymmetries. Chinchero is a good example. Since its declaration as cultural heritage of the nation in 2002, and subsequent appropriation by the state, the Inca site with its associated Inca-colonial small historic center have been the focus of aggressive conservation policies, dictated as much by a global conservation paradigm, as by the expectations of booming regional cultural tourism. To a large extent, such imperatives have run contrary to the interests, customs, and understandings of a local population with different heritage values linked to uninterrupted traditions of care, as well as to continuing social and biographical engagement with the built environment (see García 2018a). A case in point is the colonial temple. In the popular mindset, the temple ranks over the Inca ruins because, as opposed to the ruins, there has been an uninterrupted tradition of care since colonial times through the institution of mayordomía (stewardship). In addition, the temple has continued to be the locus of important individual and collective biographical events for the villagers, such as baptisms, weddings, celebrations, and so on, to the extent that for them their history is there (García 2018a). Besides this, memories of the grandfathers who built the church – and sometimes died in the process – is very much alive because some of those bodies are buried underneath the structure and also because the building’s continuous use and engagement with contemporary life in Chinchero (García 2018a).

Also, among these traditions of care is the re-utilization and re-cycling of pre-Hispanic and colonial materials for contemporary purposes. This customary practice is punished by the site managers, who are then confronted with the uncomfortable fact that villagers prefer to get rid of, or even destroy, this legacy rather than facing penalties or long and costly bureaucratic processes to undertake urgent maintenance work in their households (García 2018a). Thus, the patrimonialization of the ruins has turned them into a de facto semi-private space, largely excised from the rest of the town and its social dynamics, and under the physical and symbolic control of heritage experts – mainly archaeologists and architects – working for the State.

These orthodox, or authorized, practices, endorsed by a rigid legal framework, are aligned with the “universal” principles that, in spite of more recent emphasis on local and community values, as well as on non-western notions of authenticity, still transpire in a UNESCO global heritage model informed by western ideals of monumentality, intangibility, and integrity. They operate both in spatial and temporal terms. As for space, they re-territorialize the ruins and subdue them to an authoritarian regime of governance characterized by physical and symbolic exclusion. Also, they redraw traditional boundaries while enforcing a set of legal restrictions that impinge on customary activity such as agropastoralism and ceremonial life. These restrictions have negatively impacted local patterns of mobility within the site, and have curtailed relationships with a historical landscape that has been turned into an icon through “cleaning-up” practices for tourism consumption. Instead they have favored the regulated and largely disembodied movement of the tourists in an abstract space – and by abstract it is meant sterilized and devoid of identity – that can be packaged and commodified.

Regarding temporality, refashioning the ruins into a space where time has been evacuated through restoration and conservation practices, and whereby all traces of contemporary activity have been largely removed, has signaled an irreversible split between the past and the present. In this context, to meet the expectations of a cultural tourism that relies upon the production of difference, the archaeological site is kept as “Inca” as possible by reaffirming the monumentality and materiality of the site through restoration and maintenance work (see García 2018b). At the same time, maintaining the temporal distinction in town between an archaeological zone – intangible, potentially touristic, and under the custody of the professionals of the past – and a non-archaeological one, has asserted the authority of heritage experts over that of community members. The same problem applies to the Inca-colonial urban center, which by virtue of its categorization as “historic,” is similarly subjected to a set of restrictions and regulations derived from the temporal disjunctions created by the arbitrary divide between what is historic and what is not (García 2017).

Unsurprisingly, conservation imperatives in Chinchero are largely driven by cultural tourism and are therefore tied to economic agendas and initiatives, like the large-scale process of enhancement of pre-Hispanic ruins in Peru. These enhancements underline the link between conservation and capitalism and the contradictions often involved in this relationship (Brockington and Duffy 2011; Milne 2021). The current construction of Chinchero Airport in the name of tourism and development testifies to this tension, as it is destroying the very same landscape that visitors come to see.

A Cultural Landscape Approach?

Current models of archaeological heritage conservation in Chinchero are hindering intercultural dialog between community members and heritage managers of urban background. By recasting – through scientific language and practice – pre-Hispanic ruins as “archaeological sites,” they come under the governance of archaeologists, and links with the villagers are severed, a process noted by other scholars in other contexts (Byrne 1991; Smith 2004). In the same manner that national parks often ignore cultural aspects and long-term custodian responsibilities of Indigenous peoples the world over (Disko and Tugendhat 2014), archaeological sites in Peru neglect contemporary cultural dynamics within their boundaries. This is conservation predicated upon the separation between humans and nature, which runs contrary to a holistic Andean worldview where people and things live together. The culture/nature divide is sanctioned in a Peruvian legislation abiding the 1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (https://whc.unesco.org/en/conventiontext/) and the 2003 UNESCO Intangible Heritage Convention (https://ich.unesco.org/doc/src/15164-EN.pdf.). Peruvian law clearly differentiates between Protected Natural Areas and Cultural Heritage of the Nation. Cultural landscapes belong to the latter category, and Chinchero, as part of the Sacred Valley of the Incas that was declared Cultural Heritage of the Nation in 2006, is classified as such. The tight control exerted over the site, inclusive of a set of prohibitions and punishments in case of damage done to it, is explained by the strict legal protection imposed on immovable pre-Hispanic cultural heritage, namely archaeological sites (Law 28296), considered to be state property. Such an authoritarian treatment is uncommon for other types of cultural property. As the Inca ruins of Chinchero were declared an archaeological park in 2002, the same restrictive regime described above applies for any protected archaeological area, because of their condition as pre-Hispanic cultural property, regardless of their consideration as cultural landscape or not. The contradiction is that while long-term, ongoing and intimate connections between historical communities and landscapes are emphasized, and even encouraged in the cultural landscape legislation, archaeological sites get around this rationale by becoming highly regulated and coercive spaces under the protection of the state and virtually devoid of social practice (García 2018a). The fact that sites in Peru are regularly managed by archaeologists and architects, with their reified visions of the material past and their patriotic understanding of their mission, has surely something to do with it (see Asensio 2019).

A possible way to bridge the culture/nature gap would be to allow the cultural landscape construct to retake central stage in relation to it being an archaeological site. Similarly, the Inca-colonial urban center would benefit from the Historic Urban Landscape perspective promoted by the UNESCO. Both approaches move away from tangible conceptualizations of heritage, based on the idea of the monument and the integrity of the built environment, to incorporate an intangible dimension more sensitive to issues of identity, time passage, belonging and sense of place: issues embedded in relationships of complementarity between dwellers and the inhabited world. The idea of the cultural landscape construct attempts to span the culture/nature divide by acknowledging the historical role of humans in the shaping and reshaping of landscapes and the relations of interdependence and reciprocity between people and the environment (Silva, Taylor, and Jones [1988] 2022). Yet there are limitations too. The concept itself still retains something of this divide (see Buckley [1988] 2022). Besides this, the very notion of landscape invokes a European artistic and representational tradition that privileges a detached visuality over other engagements with the physical world not predicated upon a neat distinction between subject and object (Fabian [1983] 2014; Howes and Classen 2013).

Advocates of cultural landscapes (Silva, Taylor, and Jones [1988] 2022; Taylor and Lennon 2011) emphasize issues of identity, memory, belonging, and historical process attached to the concept, to argue for its utility and currency. However, can the notion of cultural landscape – a western construct – fully account for the complexity and richness of Indigenous conceptualizations of these relationships, as condensed, for example, in the concepts of Pacha in the Andes, or Country in Aboriginal Australia, and of the responsibilities they involve in terms of caring? Both Pacha and Country weave together, in non-linear temporal frameworks that collapse clear boundaries between the past, the present and the future, the intimate traces of human and non-human action, over a landscape conceptualized as a living, sentient, and nurturing entity. By stressing these ties, they foreground the main role of descendant populations as rightful custodians and managers. For its part, the notion of territorio, more commonly used in the rural Andes than that of the landscape, strongly resonates with ongoing historical struggles over the land. By contrast, the idea of cultural landscape, arguably alien or meaningless for many Indigenous peoples, comes across as politically innocuous. As Baird (2013) argues, this concept may silence power relations inherent in the historical production of territories. These power relations are played out, for example, in heritage-related spheres, like the discrepant stories that do not make their way into the official narratives of parks and sites, or in the imbalances in decision-making positions between experts and community representatives. For these reasons, the cultural landscape as a category appears too weak and too embedded in the global heritage apparatus to seriously challenge entrenched structures of power, even if it may be a step forward in terms of Indigenous rights recognition.

Keeping this last remark in mind, and in spite of the previous criticism, what implications arise concerning management of Chinchero archaeological site as a living cultural landscape? First, and foremost, recognition of its social dimension associated with traditional activity. Second, and consequently, the reintroduction of customary landscape practices conforming to a tradition of land care inscribed in long-standing Andean institutions. This reintroduction of landscape practices and associated folk histories, with their own temporalities and spatial orders, would encourage, in turn, the resocialization of the abstract space of the ruins and the recovery of its former condition as place. Such a move would not necessarily be incompatible with current development activities like tourism or other endeavors. It should be clarified, though, that advocating the reintroduction of these practices in the ruins is not merely about restoring agriculture to look good for the authenticity-seeking cultural tourist (see Gnecco 2019, 22). Rather, it is about reinstating a regime of territorial governance anchored in updated tradition and with tangible political implications. Third, it would afford a sense of re-appropriation by the community that could initially take the shape of a joint management initiative, following the example of countries like Australia. Here, joint management arrangements between Aboriginal groups and the State are common, like in the case of Uluru National Park, even if these arrangements are not exempt from difficulties and challenges (Birckhead et al. 1992). And fourth, it would confirm a trend in Latin America to de-archaeologize Indigenous sacred spaces, like in the case of Pueblito Chairama in the Northern Colombian region of Santa Marta, where the Kogui people have regained control of the “archeological site,” and is once again used for ceremonial purposes (Londoño 2021).

To redress the imbalances derived from the formal/legal treatment of the ruins as archaeological heritage, it is important to look at what kinds of alternative political regimes and social orders can be restored in the ruins inspired by the temporalities of vernacular landscape practices, as well as by local notions of time. The study of temporalities in turn begs the issue of movement/circulation through the landscape, as movement is essentially temporal (as much as time is spatialized) and its analysis is relevant to what these circulation patterns can tell us today, with respect to heritage landscapes management and care. Thus, the next section goes on to explore Andean concepts of time and movement patterns that have historically informed an Andean world and worldview. These concepts directly challenge conservation ideals that, as Karlström (2013) has shown, rely on universalist assumptions about the critical importance of maintaining a link with the past via the preservation of its material remains for identity purposes. The consequence of those ideals is a static, reifying, almost fundamentalist heritage ideology that precludes other dynamic engagements with the past, predicated upon change, impermanence and the manipulation of the physical world for present needs (Karlström 2013). As a counterproposal to this heritage system, Andean temporalities emphasize circulation, mobility, and reutilization as modes of being in the world. Instead of focusing on the inert conservation of its material integrity, they are concerned with making the continuation of life possible.

Andean Temporalities in Motion

Andean concepts of time are subsumed under the notion of Pacha. As stated above, Pacha, apart from the earth in general, is the world; and it encompasses both space and time. Pacha is a particular socio-temporal order whose time is qualitative rather than quantitative and admits change, even cataclysms (Salomon and Urioste 1991). Therefore, Andeans perceived the Spanish invasion as a pacha-kuti, an inversion of the world order and the beginning of a new era. This idea of inversion, or alternation, lies at the heart of what – drawing from the writings of early colonial Indigenous chroniclers like Felipe Guamán Poma – , has been often defined as the cyclical nature of Andean time (Ossio 2014; Rivera 2012; Estermann and Peña 1997). Guamán Poma ([1615] 1980) conceptualizes history as a set of succeeding pachas or worlds-ages, yet time in his work is discontinuous and does not follow a linear arrangement of events. According to Szeminski (1990), these cycles – each terminated with a pacha-kuti – would not be consecutive, but rather parallel, and would follow a kinship model based on nested hierarchies of cycles wherein the future inherits traits of the past. This freedom with respect to a constraining chronological framework correlates with the way contemporary chincherinos talk about the mytho-historical past, their narratives more concerned about highlighting what is important to them than about organizing the events in their “right” temporal sequence (see García 2018a).

Moreover, when asked about history, apart from telling the tales of colonial struggles against the landowners, they refer legends and origin stories that explain the creation of the world by mythical ancestors moving through the landscape. They also speak about the gentiles, or the “ancients.” Contrary to what historical research postulates (Rostworoski 1970), these are the first inhabitants of their world, powerful and dangerous ancestors who are still alive and active today, often in the shape of bones, dwelling in caves and under the earth (Allen 2012). This sense of closeness between the dead and the living is also pervasive in Andean art and iconography, as well as in current ideas about the dead being always around, never completely leaving this world. Contemporary practice underscores these relationships, such as the custom of leaving food and drink for the deceased in the cemetery on special occasions during the year, when the ancestors are believed to come back and rejoice. This is not to say that chincherinos today, especially the younger generations, do not live their lives fully immersed in the linear temporality of modernity. But the continuation of certain ideas and practices suggest that the past is not completely a “foreign country.”

The concept of Pacha-kuti strongly evokes a movement of alternation and recalls an Andean dualism that has historically organized the world in pairs of opposites that alternate or “take turns” in a complementary manner, like day and night, wet and dry seasons, male and female, upper and lower, etc. (Platt 1978). Nowhere is the notion of alternation clearer than in two important, closely related temporal concepts. One is ayni, which on the one hand designates the extended practice of reciprocal aid, or exchange, among working parties or households; while on the other hand is suffused with the idea of something that goes back to where it started, of a back and forth, of something that comes and goes like a pendulum and that provides continuity in time.

The second one is kuti, literally to return, to make something or somebody return (Rosa Quillahuamán, in personal communication to the author, March 2023; see also González Holguín ([1608] 1901)). Kuti, with its idiomatic variations, is pervasive in the Quechua language as well as in cultural practice like weaving and agriculture. Precisely, a most prominent textile design is called kuti. Its shape strongly conveys that sense of return, exchange, and continuation of something that unfolds upon itself and regularly inverts its direction. Also, Andean commentators (Lajo 2006) have likened the nature of time in the Andes to a series of interconnected ripples that radiate out from a center.

Radiality is a long-standing Andean pattern of socio-temporal organization (Lajo 2006; Zuidema 1964). The agricultural calendar in the Cuzco region is conceptualized and represented as a rotating disc where every agricultural season, with its corresponding months and specific tasks, has its place in it, and moves along as the year goes by. An even more sophisticated similar pattern was found in Inca times. The so called ceque lines were a set of imaginary lines that radiated out from the center of the city of Cuzco in all directions of Tawantinsuyo or the Inca empire (Zuidema 1964). They projected hierarchical social relationships onto the landscape by regulating access to the land and water, as well as by organizing the cult of the huacas or shrines that dotted the lines (Bauer 1998). It is likely that the model, with its associated social groupings, rotated in space and time, taking turns for the various tasks involved, as is suggested in ethnohistoric sources (Salomon and Urioste 1991).

The concepts of kuti and ayni have a spatial correlate in characteristic Andean patterns of circulation and movement. Following Ingold (2021), from an anthropological perspective wherever there is life there is movement; this is, a permanent becoming that contributes to the ongoing formation of the world. Such is the view of a world in perpetual flux held by animistic ontologies like the Andean one, or in some parts of Indigenous Australia (Arabena 2015). Besides this, I understand movement as propagation. In other words, a generative impulse, an expansive place-making dynamic that produces and sustains multiple forms of relationships with a territory whose identity is defined by the very nature of that movement within it. This is consistent with an Andean cosmology where everything is in motion and where ritual life is aimed at encouraging the circulation of biological energy through pacha – or the world – by performing social exchange among its living parts (Salomon 1998; see also Bastien 1985; Gose 2019). We find similar ideas, for example, in Melanesia about growth, exchange and transformation that underpin inward-outward processes of fluidity and change (Mondragón 2008).

The temporalities of alternation, return, and of ebbing and flowing are historically recognizable in practices and institutions like Mit’a, or the periodical forced labor carried out away from home – both for the Incas and the Spanish – by their subdued populations, typically in the mines, in coca plantations, and in textile workshops (Quiroz 2020). Another example comes from Reducciones, newly Spanish settlements created to put an end to the disperse population pattern of the Indians across the highland landscape and bring them together in Spanish-styled towns to facilitate governance and tax-collection. The response of many Indians was to refuse resettlement, rather to continue ebbing and flowing daily between their villages and the town instead (Mumford 2012). Besides this, all sorts of pilgrimages have historically traversed the Andean milieu for the cult of multiple shrines both in pre and post-contact times, with their two-way journeys to and from home. During these events, often more danced with music than walked, the moving bodies engage in a kinesthetic recovery and appropriation of the sacred powers of the landscape (Sallnow 1987). Also, in many Andean origin stories the forefathers migrated from their place of origin to the promised land, suggesting that movement itself stands at the core of identity and birth. In the Huarochirí manuscript – a prime ethnohistoric source – is the creative movement of the huacas (sacred beings and places) that shapes the landscape forms and the world more generally (Salomon 1998).

The examination of native temporalities reveals two things: first, that long-term patterns of alternation, cyclicality, rotation and seasonality lie at the core of an Andean world historically concerned with the reproduction of life in a hostile milieu, rather than with the conservation of material remains of the past. Such remains have been originally part of this philosophy, as Andean building tradition encourages processes of periodic renovation, destruction, and reutilization of materials linked to issues of historical remembrance and social renovation (Nair 2015; Niles 1999). This material culture has become separated from this ontology with its modern heritagization. Second, that their internal dynamics, rhythms, and circularity provide an effective response to the challenge of organizing society and allow for the regeneration of the social by providing balance and constant exchange amongst its members. As specific modes of inhabiting and moving within the world, they become knowledge that creates the conditions for the continuation of life and suggest models for an alternative engagement with universalist conceptions of heritage.

In line with this discussion on Andean temporalities and their potential to destabilize current heritage regimes, the next section will discuss two landscape practices in Chinchero. Both of them will provide clues as to how vernacular temporalities, uses of space, and movement patterns can be successfully applied in a heritage management model more sensitive to indigenous historical experiences and current political aspirations of greater control over their resources.

Muyuy and Linderaje or How to go Back from Sites to Ruins Again

Muyuy is a Quechua word that can be translated as to rotate, to spin, go in circles, or take turns (González Holguín [1608] 1901). It embodies an old standing principle of social organization, whereby communal land is distributed among families, according to their size and needs. These plots are in practice inherited and passed down within each family, even if families legally remain users and not owners. In the sector of Cúper Pueblo in Chinchero – the one studied for this paper – there are seven muyuys or agricultural areas. Each muyuy is divided into multiple plots. Typically, each family has land in every muyuy. The system rotates annually, normally clockwise, but not necessarily. Out of the seven muyuys, three or four remain fallow each year to allow the land to recover, for a period of several years. The first year, potato is planted in the designated muyuy; the second year, the potato rotates to the next muyuy and green bean (or a similar crop) is planted in the first muyuy. In the third year the potato moves on to the following muyuy. The green bean rotates to the second muyuy and in the first muyuy typically grass or oat is planted and used as forage for livestock. The system keeps rotating this way, but by the fourth year the first muyuy goes fallow (for some three or four years, when it is devoted to cattle grazing) and so do the other muyuys in a consecutive manner, as muyuy progresses until a seven-year cycle is completed. This cycle combines with the three-year round (potato, green bean, oat) proper to each plot.

This combination of a seven and three-year cycle is consistent with the poly-cyclical nature of Andean organization in rural areas, whereby farmers have to handle a multiplicity of crop cycles in parallel in a highly diverse Andean ecosystem (Golte 1987). Every year community members agree on a specific date for harvesting – typically around May, during the harvest season. They do it together and in a synchronized manner to prevent cattle from trespassing onto somebody’s land and ruining the harvest.

The benefits of muyuy, as reported by comuneros (community members) themselves during several fieldwork seasons, are varied. First, the land is worked in an orderly, collective manner, fostering group cohesion and identity as well as diversified crop production. Crop rotation, together with the alternation of production and fallow periods, additionally promotes sound ecological management, as it avoids pests and minimizes the use of chemicals. Besides this, rotation forces comuneros to travel through community land. This in turn enhances a sense of territoriality, enables the transmission of knowledge, reinvigorates the landscape, and renovates intimate ties with it through an array of associated practices like walking, naming, storytelling, libations to the apus or protective mountain spirits, and other traditions. Furthermore, muyuy is a matter of food security as, by regularly rotating crops and muyuys, a sustained annual production is ensured in a highly unpredictable environment (Rocío Cjuiro, community member in personal communication to the author, January 2023).

The second landscape practice is Linderaje (from the Spanish word lindero or boundary). This is a festival held in February, at the peak of the rainy season and the maturation of the crops, whereby community members walk in circles around the communal boundaries. As they walk about they honor the milestones that dot the landscape and mark the boundaries between communities. Milestones – for the most part in the shape of earth mounds – are acknowledged as ancestors (García 2018a; Pérez-Galán 2001). Their names – a combination of Christian and Andean nomenclature – are called out and celebrated. The marching party, accompanied by music, is led by the waylakas, men dressed like women who run and dance up and down, back and forth, while waving white flags. Their kuti or ayni-like movement in space and the flags represent territoriality and peace respectively (Gerónimo Cusihuamán, community member in personal communication to the author, March 2012). Following the waylakas come the traditional authorities in their ethnic clothes and carrying their symbols of office and authority. Before the milestone’s name is called out, they climb to the top of the mound and drive their staffs into the earth, along with a variety of plants and small crosses that symbolize fertility and crop protection in the seasonal context of maturation. Remembering properly the names of the milestones is a serious matter, as names can be used as documentary evidence in boundary-related legal disputes between neighboring communities (see García 2018a).

But linderaje, apart from being a festival, is also the main faena of the year; that is, collective work for the benefit of the community, as it is related to land property and agricultural production. Therefore, that day, comuneros carry their peaks and spades with them to replenish the soil lost during the year, or to restore the milestones to their original position in case they have been moved by a neighboring community with the intention of annexing an extra portion of land.

Linderaje is, essentially, a celebration of territoriality, as well as a renewal of ties with a historic landscape perceived as sentient and animated. It can also be seen as a counter-narrative to hegemonic heritage landscape conservation regimes promoting exclusion, displacement, and de-territorialization. It shows instead how local heritage values based on use, recycling, circulation and jurisdiction, are effective in the protection of the landscape, supported by regimes that organically conflate multiple temporalities. This coexistence is especially notorious in the milestones. On the one hand, they are the locus of the ancestors, active repositories of memory and identity; on the other, they are political agents that mediate important contemporary communal affairs.

The analysis of muyuy and linderaje reveals some of the underlying principles upon which they operate. Among these, we have a cyclically organized political control over the land; free movement through an animated landscape where relationships of care and reciprocity are reproduced and folk history enacted; heritage values based on affect, re-use, and utilitarian engagements with the material past; a pervasive sense of alternation and circularity that provides continuation in time, etc. They organically blend long-term, efficient ecological management principles with cultural concerns in dynamic temporal schemes that encourage social regeneration. This practice/knowledge could be transferred to the management of the Inca ruins and the archaeological zone together, dissolving unfortunate ontological boundaries between the archaeological and the historical-contemporary. Basically, they offer a possible way out of the various fractures that stem from the modern conservationist paradigm, namely the past/present and the nature/culture divides. In the final section, and by way of conclusion, these principles are further elaborated, condensed, and presented as the fabric of a preliminary proposal for a new management model of the Inca site.

Conclusion: Towards a New Model or Archaeological Heritage Management

Considering the previous discussion, it is time to ask what elements, or processes, would provide the basis for an alternative model of archaeological site management in Chinchero that may in turn inspire other non-Andean contexts.

1.	Territoriality

Muyuy and linderaje are anchored in traditional forms of Andean sociopolitical organization based on land ownership and on related movement patterns. Thus, regaining effective control and jurisdiction over the land is a prerequisite for any meaningful discussion on heritage in Chinchero in terms of inclusion and participatory processes. Territoriality binds people and land together and foregrounds land tenure issues in a heritage regime that tries to eschew the political tensions inherent to intercultural dynamics. Its recognition opens the door for the reintroduction of traditional management and caring regimes, which in turn ensure the safeguarding of traditional boundaries by encouraging circulatory movement around the landscape and the renewal of reciprocal bonds with it.

2.	Circulation over conservation

Customary landscape practices entail temporalities that favor movement as a form of knowledge and caring for the land, as well as a statement of territorial sovereignty. In order to de-archaeologize and de-monumentalize the site, a dynamic circulation principle should be reinstated as a fundamental management guiding criterium. Andean circulation has historically encouraged the movement of people, things, animals, ritual substances and relationships through the landscape. In themselves, these movement patterns must be seen as land management. Circulation also promotes the recuperation of old pathways abandoned because of heritagization-related displacement processes. Time too must be allowed to re-circulate in the ruins, not only by means of social practice invested with the temporalities of rotation, return, and seasonality, but also through the reassessment of zealous restoration and maintenance activity, both of which inhibit a sense of time passage and historicity. The same tenet applies to oral history, which is enacted during dynamic landscape events. A principle of circulation over conservation may legitimize the re-utilization and re-cycling of pre-Hispanic and colonial materials for contemporary purposes. Such practice is consistent with an Andean building tradition based on principles of temporary use and renewal, of periodical destruction and reconstruction, which in turn encourages social reproduction processes.

3.	Historicity

The imposition of an archaeological conservation mode, along with an atemporal and static monumentalist paradigm, have suspended time in the ruins, separated the past from the present, and also have removed this encapsulated space from the flow of local history with its ongoing social dynamics. Bringing back local temporalities, embedded in social practice and ritual, with their strong sense of alternation, exchange and continuity in time, will restore to the site its full temporal and historic condition as a ruin. Additionally, re-historicizing the ruins means the reintroduction of other historical regimes, beyond archaeological narratives and the mythologized history of the Incas and the Spanish invaders. This folk history of Chinchero is made up of tales of the creation of the landscape; of its occupation by gentiles – first ancestors – who still wander around; of the histories of struggles against landowners and the fight for land titles in colonial times, as well as the histories of agriculture or of multiple journeys through the landscape undertaken by a whole community over time.

4.	Local values and uses of heritage

Dominant narratives in Chinchero stemming from an authorized heritage discourse hold that the villagers lack heritage values or consciousness, and that their customary activity is almost by default detrimental to the protection of the town’s cultural legacy. This is simply incorrect. Apart from recognizable historic patterns of re-use, recycling, and reconstruction, local heritage values are best appreciated in practices like linderaje and muyuy, or in the greater importance accorded in town to the colonial temple compared with the Inca ruins due to the ongoing villagers’ biographical identification with this building, and its uninterrupted tradition of use. Regarding linderaje, it is all about circulation, jurisdiction, the collapse of a neat past–present distinction, and practical engagement with a non-patrimonialized, storied landscape. As for muyuy, it bespeaks cherished patterns of territorial organization in motion that foster group identity and permanent re-appropriation of the landscape through seasonality and rotation.

5.	Cultural landscape-legislation

Muyuy and linderaje show in practice how the culture/nature divide can be bridged by organically bringing together ecology, social practice, and multiple temporalities. In spite of its shortcomings, a cultural landscape approach to the ruins and the historic center in Chinchero would be useful to overcome the paralysis derived from the prevailing monumentalist paradigm. Cultural landscapes acknowledge process over form and therefore embrace change and transformation through social engagement, as well as a multitemporal dimension, as essential to landscapes and territories. They also emphasize intangible aspects neglected under the current model, such as identity, memory, knowledge, and affects, as well as the interdependence and historical connections between people and the land. Peruvian legislation recognizes archaeological sites as cultural landscapes, yet in practice they are not treated as such. On the contrary, sites are subjected to a strict set of legal restrictions that only highlights the urgent need for changes in heritage legislation.

6.	Restitution

Reclaiming the reintroduction of landscape practices in the site’s management model is about reinstating a territorial regime of governance grounded in updated tradition. Regaining political sovereignty over the ruins (and having a say in decision-making instances) would ease a sense of dispossession and alienation resulting from the historical engagement of Andeans with the colonial and republican states. This re-appropriation process must be situated within a larger context of ongoing struggles for the repatriation of First Nations’ cultural property around the globe. This raises the question of co-management in the site. Unlike in countries like Australia, co-management initiatives are rare in Peru, if not virtually inexistent. The way archaeology has been historically constituted in the country, as the rightful and patriotic custodian (if not owner) of the country’s vast archaeological legacy, has made it very difficult for the discipline to engage in power-sharing dynamics with other actors involved. While keeping in mind that co-management models have not always been successful, and that these models confront local communities with serious challenges to overcome, in the Peruvian case it would still be a novel and significant step forward in terms of recognition and meaningful participation in heritage management processes.

Ethics Statement

Ethics approval for this research was obtained on 6 January 2023 from the European Union (Funding Body), Grant Number 892863-TAHL, Deliverable number 1, Work Package number 1.

It was agreed that, in the ethnographic context of the research, based on long-term relationships of trust between the researcher and the research subjects, consent from participants could be oral rather than written, as asking the participants to sign unfamiliar forms to them would undermine these relationships.

In seeking (and obtaining) oral consent, the research plan was fully explained, adding that objections could be raised at any time, and that everyone understood that they could withdraw cooperation if they changed their minds.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union under Grant Number 892863-TAHL; The Wenner-Gren Foundation under Grant Number 9945. This publication is part of the project “HabitPAT. Caring and Dwelling Intangible Heritage” (PID2020-118696RB-I00) funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033.