Parker VanValkenburgh

Mobilization as mediation: implementing a tablet-based recording system for ceramic classification

ABSTRACT In this essay, we examine the potentials and challenges of mobile computing for a core activity of archaeological laboratory research—the typological analysis of ceramics. We discuss the collaborative development, implementation, and evaluation of the PAZC Ceramics module in the FAIMS Mobile platform. Our deployment of the module yielded significant improvements in the efficiency of data collection, as well as reduced numbers of missing fields and higher user satisfaction scores. However, it did not improve data consistency between users and yielded a classificatory system that was somewhat more challenging to update than our previous mode of operation. These results underscore some of the trade-offs that may be entailed in employing mobile technologies for archaeological applications and highlight the ways in which specific media configurations impact the production of archaeological knowledge. En este artículo, examinamos las posibilidades y desafíos que presenta la computación móvil para una actividad fundamental de la investigación arqueológica —el análisis tipológico de la cerámica. Discutimos el desarrollo colaborativo, la implementación y la evaluación de PAZC Ceramics, un módulo de la plataforma de Sistemas de Manejo de Información Adquirida en Campo (FAIMS, por sus siglas en inglés). Nuestra implementación del módulo produjo mejoras significativas en la eficiencia de la recolección de datos, así como un número reducido de campos perdidos y mayores puntuaciones de satisfacción de usuario. Sin embargo, no mejoró la coherencia de los datos entre usuarios y produjo un sistema clasificatorio un poco más difícil de actualizar respecto al modo de operación anterior. Estos resultados ponen de relieve algunos de los retos que presenta el empleo de tecnologías móviles para aplicaciones arqueológicas y destacan las maneras en que las configuraciones específicas del sistema de registro pueden afectar la producción del conocimiento arqueológico.

Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes / Negotiated Settlements: Andean Communities and Landscapes under Inka and Spanish Colonialism

The reducción general, or general resettlement of Indians, holds a prominent place in many synthetic histories of the late sixteenth century Andes—appearing, alongside the mita labor draft and the Visita General, as one of the three core initiatives of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo’s program to reorder Andean society in the 1570s CE. Legislated between 1569 and 1575, reducción sought to forcibly resettle the Viceroyalty’s indigenous populations into series of planned towns, with the goal of instilling them with policía, facilitating their Christian instruction, and converting them into docile subjects of the Spanish Crown. Introductory courses in Latin American history usually include at least some content on sixteenth-century forced resettlement, but the possibility of a more fine-grained historiography of reducción has been forestalled by the relative scarcity of documentary sources describing the movement’s concrete impacts on indigenous communities and landscapes. And thus, despite the abundance of scholarship on visitas and indigenous labor in twentiethcentury ethnohistory, histories of reducción have tended to be thinly descriptive (and heavily reliant on interpretations of Toledo’s own decrees). It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the dominant account of reducción—what Mumford calls ‘the transparent model’ (8)—has treated the movement as a straightforward (if not largely successful) attempt to wipe out Andean traditions and habits and drawn comparisons between Toledo’s initiatives and high modernist planning projects. However, over the past twenty years, and with increasing frequency in the previous half decade, a series of studies has produced alternative accounts of reducción. In the process, scholars in the fields of archaeology, art Colonial Latin American Review, 2014 Vol. 23, No. 2, 280–294, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2014.917550