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New tambos, old routes: the archaeology of mobility in the highlands of Tacna (AD 1830-1930)

Nuevos tambos, rutas antiguas: la arqueología de la movilidad en las tierras altas de Tacna (1830-1930 d. C.)
Nouveaux tambos, anciennes routes : l’archéologie de la mobilité dans les hautes terres de Tacna (1830-1930 après J.-C.)
Noa Corcoran-Tadd
p. 119-153

Resúmenes

Tacna y Arica desempeñaron un papel importante durante los períodos colonial y poscolonial como puntos de conexión entre el altiplano boliviano y un Pacífico globalizado. Sin embargo, los paisajes rurales de movilidad y de minería que dieron forma a la importancia estratégica de la región siguen estando pobremente registrados en el archivo documental. Basándose en una investigación arqueológica realizada a ambos lados de la frontera entre Perú y Chile, este artículo explora las evidencias materiales del comercio, la minería y el consumo en una serie de tambos rurales del siglo XIX en las tierras altas de Tacna y ofrece una nueva perspectiva de la historia de la región tal y como fue transformada por la liberalización, la construcción del Estado y las comunidades rurales.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the many collaborators and colleagues who have helped make this research possible, most importantly George Chauca Iparraguirre, who directed the PIA Tambos de Palca in 2015, and Patricia Maita, who conducted the zooarchaeological analysis for the Palca project. I would also like to thank the Ministerio de Cultura del Perú, the Dirección Desconcentrada de Cultura de Tacna, the Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales de Chile, and the communities of Palca, Vilavilani, and Tacora. I also acknowledge the helpful feedback from three anonymous reviewers and the support of IFEA, particularly the efforts of Catherine Lara and Kattia Pacheco in facilitating both the initial symposium in 2021 and the subsequent publication process.

1Located between the quebradas of the Tacna precordillera and the edges of the Bolivian altiplano, a series of substantial, abandoned structures are not quite what they appear. Built as waystations using traditional architectural forms and materials and located along a major coastal-highland route, the appearance of these structures is broadly suggestive of the long-standing tradition of tambo roadside waystations that stretched back to the Inca Empire and the construction of the imperial road network (Qhapaq Ñan) in the 15th and 16th centuries (Hyslop, 1984; Santoro et al., 2010).

2This particular chain of tambos along the routes connecting Palca (Peru) and Tacora (Chile), however, tells a very different history of commercial connectivity and extractivism during the 19th and early 20th centuries. During this period, the wider ‘Andean Tripartito’ corridor had rapidly grown in importance as a key infrastructural bottleneck through which passed the networks of roads, canals, telegraphs, and railroads that articulated the new and often contested spatial forms of the 19th-century territorial state (Centeno, 2002; Maier, 2014), and the post-1850 resurgence in mining operations in Peru, Bolivia, and northern Chile (Barragán Romano et al., 2014; Brown, 2012). Within this context, the tambo sites offer the possibility to explore the material record of the early republican period in a landscape where nation-states, rural communities, and globally connected commercial networks came together in new, often conflictive relationships.

3Over the four centuries following the construction of the Qhapaq Ñan, the tambo as institution had undergone major transformations tracking key shifts in the political economy of the south-central Andes (Glave, 1989). The 19th century saw particularly notable transformations, with tambos in some areas persisting as sites of tributary extraction and community enterprise and in other areas shifting into ever more privatized forms that articulated with the new commercial and mining economies (Corcoran-Tadd, 2017: 71-78). While the terminology and some of the basic functions of provisioning long-distance travelers and caravans had endured, the archive also hints at the diversification and fragmentation of the rural tambo as institution during this period.

  • 1 The rather different trajectory of urban tambos – which persisted as commercial depots with warehou (...)

4Yet what these transformations looked like on the ground at the hundreds of rural tambos dotting the strategic routes that knitted together the region remains largely occluded in traditional accounts of the period.1 The following paper draws on a combination of archaeological and historical research conducted between 2015 and 2018 to explore the Palca-Tacora tambos as a case study of this institution in flux.

5As such, this investigation in the highlands of the Tripartito makes two interventions that situate the archaeology of Tacna within wider discussions in Andean archaeology and historiography. First, the project articulates with moves by historical archaeologists working in the south-central Andes to look beyond the colonial period and towards the 19th and 20th centuries. Much of the pioneering work in the wider region on the post-independence period has come from archaeologists working in Chile and Argentina (rather than in Peru and Bolivia), with a close attention to regional specificities and local trajectories (Funari & Zarankin, comps., 2004; Salazar & Vilches, 2014). One major theme of this research tradition across the Cono Sur as well as in the south-central Andes has been the tracing of the material histories of extractive capitalism and state violence otherwise invisibilized in the official archive. Flora Vilches and Héctor Morales (2017), for example, have examined the dynamics of Atacameño pastoralists entering labor markets associated with sulfur mining and llareta fuel gathering, while Dante Angelo (2018) has explored the industrial landscapes of chilenización in highland Arica following the War of the Pacific (1879-1883). Other investigations have highlighted the ways that landscapes of mobility and connectivity were transformed after independence, with Maria Fernanda Boza Cuadros (2019) tracing the maritime communities that formed along Arequipa’s coast, Francisco García-Albarido (2017; 2022) tracking the rise and fall of traffic along the Potosí-Cobija route during the 18th and 19th centuries, and Pablo Méndez-Quirós (2020) mapping the long-term landscapes of preconquest and historical road networks in Arica.

6Second, the paper makes a case for sustained engagement between historical archaeologists and wider historical scholarship on the region. While Andean historical archaeology currently runs the risk of developing an increasingly parochial and inward perspective, the current case study hopefully demonstrates that both archaeological and archival studies have much to contribute to ‘bottom-up’ perspectives on regional and interregional processes of state formation, resource extraction, and trade globalization in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Barragán Romano et al., 2014; Langer, 2009; Larson, 2004; van Buren, 2024). Only a conjoined effort that brings together the material archive of archaeological landscapes and the dense documentation of the paper archive can fully trace these historical processes as they unfolded across the uneven spaces of the region. Tacna’s location both on one of the major colonial routes of the silver trade during the colonial period and in one of the most contested spaces in post-independence state building in South America (González Miranda, 2008; Skuban, 2007) make it a particularly fruitful location to deepen such interdisciplinary discussions.

1. Regional and global histories

7Before examining the archaeological sites themselves, it is worth outlining the wider historical context of the Palca-Tacora route along which they are located. The area between Tacna and the ‘Andean Tripartito’ region where the modern borders of Peru, Chile, and Bolivia intersect has long been an important corridor of movement. Located within the Pacajes zone of influence that extended up the tributaries of the Río Mauri and down into the precordillera during the Late Intermediate Period (1000-1400 CE; see Housse in this volume; Kesseli & Pärssinen, 2005), the corridor would later become one of the many coastal-highland links in the Inca imperial Qhapaq Ñan network, with four Inca-period tambos located along the route including the sites of Alto Chullpapalca, Huaylillas, Tacora, and Ancara (Corcoran-Tadd, 2017; 2019a; Muñoz, 2020).

8During the early colonial period, much traffic – including the main trunk of the colonial ruta de la plata – passed through the Parinacota corridor some 60 km further to the south of the Palca-Tacora corridor (Figure 1). This route famously connected Potosí with the Pacific (Choque Mariño & Muñoz Ovalle, 2016; López Beltrán, 2016; Rivera, 1995-1996), with silver transported down to the port of Arica and mercury, agricultural products, and mercadería de Castilla moving in the opposite direction up to the mining cities of the altiplano. At some locations along this route, there were important elements of infrastructural continuity with several Inca tambos reoccupied with varying degrees of intensity over the course of the colonial period (Santoro et al., 2010).

Figure 1 – The Palca-Tacora corridor (highlighted by the white rectangle), the colonial ruta de la plata, and select secondary routes in the south-central Andes

Figure 1 – The Palca-Tacora corridor (highlighted by the white rectangle), the colonial ruta de la plata, and select secondary routes in the south-central Andes

(Map by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)

9Yet the connection between the coast and the western edge of the altiplano was always braided by alternate and secondary routes that traced the valleys to the north and south of the primary Lluta/Azapa/Parinacota axis. Over the course of the 18th century, there appears to have been a secular shift away from this primary axis and a growing importance for the secondary route that ascended to the altiplano via Tacna and the Palca-Tacora route (Pereira Campos, 2014). As Tacna grew as an administrative and commercial center at the expense of Arica – including the moves of the Caja Real de Arica (1717) and then the silver foundry or callana (1779) to Tacna – the formerly subordinate route via Tacna gained in importance (Cavagnaro, 2006; Rosenblitt, 2013). Bolstered by additional reforms by the Bourbon administration (particularly the classification of Arica as a ‘major port’ in the Reglamento de Libre Comercio y Navegación of 1778 and the abolition of the repartimiento system of forced trade in 1784), a new class of local merchants came to dominate an expanding commercial circuit in the final decades of the 18th century (Rosenblitt, 2014).

  • 2 The late colonial/early republican trail network also connected La Paz to Moquegua; by the 1830s an (...)

10The increasing salience of the Tacna route during the late colonial period can be seen cartographically, with maps from the late 18th and early 19th centuries showing a growing emphasis on the route that travelled up Caplina Valley to Palca and the fork at the passes of Huaylillas, with a southern primary branch to Oruro and Potosí and a northern secondary branch to La Paz (see e.g. maps from c. 1760-1780 [Figure 2]; 1787; 1818).2

Figure 2 – Detail from a mid-18th century map showing the route connecting Tacna with Oruro and Potosí via the Palca-Tacora corridor (Mapa de los Obispados de Guamanca, Cuzco, La Paz e Arcebispado de Chuquisaca [c. 1760-1780], Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil)

Figure 2 – Detail from a mid-18th century map showing the route connecting Tacna with Oruro and Potosí via the Palca-Tacora corridor (Mapa de los Obispados de Guamanca, Cuzco, La Paz e Arcebispado de Chuquisaca [c. 1760-1780], Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil)
  • 3 The dynamics of the Peruvian and Bolivian economies in the decades immediately following Independen (...)

11During the decades following the Wars of Independence, mobility through the region transformed in several important ways. As the region saw economic disruption and gradual recovery, the colonial ‘espacio andino’ that had articulated the axis of Potosi, Buenos Aires, Cuzco, and Lima (Assadourian et al., 1980) was substantially restructured.3 With highland Bolivia increasingly cut off from key routes to the urban centers and Atlantic ports of the Río de La Plata region, routes to the Pacific (via Mollendo, Cobija, and Tacna) gained new prominence in the decades following independence. This traffic appears to have had multiple drivers from above and below: tariff changes during mid-1840s under the Peruvian administration of Ramón Castilla encouraged new trade into the altiplano through a “virtual régimen de libre comercio entre Tacna-Arica y Bolivia” (Rosenblitt, 2017: 47), while contraband silver may have formed a key flow out of Bolivia during the same period (Langer, 2021).

  • 4 While known to non-locals since at least the mid-17th century (Barba, 1640: 10), the sulfur deposit (...)

12While mining retained its key role in the Bolivian economy as it revived during the middle third of the 19th century, the spatial configuration of mineral extraction differed substantially from the colonial pattern that had focused on a few dominant mining centers (Brown, 2012: 108-109). As industrial metals like copper, tin, and sulfur gained increasing importance over the course of the 19th century, the mineral economy shifted towards a more decentralized geography: while tin often mapped onto the old colonial centers of silver extraction, other non-precious metals fostered the growth of new regional centers like the copper mines at Corocoro and the silver mines at Pulacayo and Caracoles. This more decentralized geography, as well as the growth of other key export commodities (particularly wool and cinchona), helped to reconfigure the landscape of mobility across the south-central Andes, as these new sites of extraction were linked into existing road networks (Barragán Romano et al., 2014). Tacora forms an indicative, if somewhat later, example of this pattern, transforming between the 1880s and 1920s from an interstitial corridor into an industrial-scale site of sulfur extraction and processing with close connections to the contemporary Atacama nitrate boom immediately to the south (Díaz Araya et al., 2016; Macchiavello Varas, 1935; Thomson, 2020).4

  • 5 Throughout the 19th century, there were repeated attempts by state actors to use the Tacna-Tacora t (...)
  • 6 In Tacna, two of the most notable cases of this broader pattern were the operations of the British- (...)

13In parallel with these changes in the extractive export economy, the period also witnessed an uneven but growing commercial integration into world markets with a growing flow of imported manufactured goods along the same networks connecting Pacific ports to the Bolivian highlands. European textiles in particular became particularly desirable commodities in the growing urban markets of La Paz, Oruro, and Cochabamba (Díaz Araya et al., 2012).5 Much has been said about the roles played by foreign actors (particularly British and French merchants) in driving the influx of European goods into Andean highland markets over the course of the 19th century (see e.g. Krüggler, 1997; Rosenblitt, 2018; 2021).6 Some of the earliest material effects of this commercial transformation were observed by Joseph Andrews, an early 19th-century British mining agent, who noted the vicinity of Tacna to the port of Arica “into which a superfluity of British goods is constantly pouring. In Higher Peru, the long mule carriage enhances the price beyond the Indian’s means, and no similar intercourse exists. Yet even under these disadvantages, there is not a rancho… which has not some garment or utensil of English fabric” (Andrews, 1827: 181-182).

  • 7 Indeed, the endpoint for this paper’s periodization marks both a notable moment in the ongoing cons (...)

14Given these dynamics of renewed resource extraction and commercial reconfiguration, the national and transnational forces that shaped the region into one of the key spaces of contested sovereignty in 19th-century Latin America (Centeno, 2002; Klein, 2011) are obviously crucial to any full account of the period. In this sense, one should situate the current case study within the persistent turns to global histories (Adelman, 2017) and archaeologies (Orser, 2009) that draw on older strands of dependency, world-systems, and comparative historical analysis. Within these traditions, one might draw upon the analytical frameworks of informal empire (given the uneven yet influential networks of British economic and political hegemony across the region [Brown, 2008]) and trade globalization (given the transport revolutions and market integrations that characterized the ‘first globalization’ of c. 1870-1914 as described by O’Rourke & Williamson [2001] and others).7

  • 8 The complex histories of the ownership and leasing of tambos along the Palca-Tacora corridor remain (...)

15But for the purposes of the current argument, focus is resolutely placed on the regional and local as primary scales of analysis. Otherwise valuable accounts foregrounding these histories of market integration and informal empire have often tended to ignore the roles played by local and regional actors in the reshaping of south-central Andean commercial networks over the course of the 19th century (although see important contributions from Cottyn, 2021; Langer, 2021; Rosenblitt, 2013). To briefly sketch out this argument, the case of Fermin and Justo Pastor Cusicanqui stand as a striking example of the new Bolivian merchant class that emerged in the final quarter of the 19th century, profiting in their case from their background as a family of former caciques originating in the highland region of Pacajes (Mendieta Parada, 2007: 37). With offices and storehouses in La Paz, Cochabamba and Tacna (International Bureau of the American Republics, 1892) and a sugar refinery at Tomasiri in the Sama Valley (Choque, 2001), the Cusicanqui brothers built up a sprawling enterprise connected by mule train networks that ran from the eastern yungas across the altiplano to Tacora, Palca and the globalizing Pacific. Part of their enterprise included the operation of several tambos in the Palca-Tacora corridor including La Libertad and La Portada (Ayca Gallegos, 2008), underlining the role of regional merchants such as the Cusicanquis in shaping the route during this period.8

Figure 3 – Travelers’ images of the Palca-Tacora corridor in the mid-19th century: a manuscript drawing of the Chupiquiña volcano by Antonio Raimondi (1864: 74) and Ephraim Squier’s engraving of a mule train framed by the tambo and volcanoes of Tacora (1877: 252)

Figure 3 – Travelers’ images of the Palca-Tacora corridor in the mid-19th century: a manuscript drawing of the Chupiquiña volcano by Antonio Raimondi (1864: 74) and Ephraim Squier’s engraving of a mule train framed by the tambo and volcanoes of Tacora (1877: 252)
  • 9 Other noteworthy instances of 19th-century movement through the Palca-Tacora corridor are provided (...)

16The critical role played the Palca-Tacora corridor as it was transformed over the course of the 19th century into a major commercial corridor and infrastructural bottleneck is also made repeatedly evident in travel accounts of the period. Some of the best-known scientific travelers from this period – including Joseph Pentland in 1827 (1974), Alcide D’Orbigny in 1830 (1843), Johann Jakob von Tschudi in 1858 (1868), and Antonio Raimondi (1864) and Ephraim Squier (1877), both in 1864 – all provided vivid accounts of their ascents through the passes of Huaylillas and around the slopes of the Tacora volcano (Figure 3).9 Collectively these accounts support the notion that the first tambos at La Portada and Tacora were constructed specifically in the late 1850s and early 1860s, with travelers in previous periods relying on a tambo in the community of Palca and informal encampments at higher elevations. Some of the wider pressures that this growing flow of traffic placed on local altiplano communities are suggested in passing references by travelers to hostile and even violent encounters along the route (e.g. Ashe, 1862: 23; Kluger, 1878: 37).

17The route also figured increasingly within wider political projects, particularly as state actors sought to regulate movement through the corridor. As part of the 1847-1849 treaty negotiations between Peru and Bolivia, the two national governments sought to establish a weekly mail service between Tacna and La Paz with a chain of dedicated posts along the route (República Boliviana, 1864: 22), while also defining the Palca-Tacora corridor as the only legal route for commercial traffic between Arica and Bolivia (República Boliviana, 1864: 21). The increasing institutionalization of official routes between the coast and the altiplano is suggested by Mateo Paz Soldán’s Geografía del Perú published fifteen years later (Paz Soldán, 1862: 111-121), where he carefully lists and maps the itineraries from Tacna to Juli, to Pisacoma, and to Oruro.

18Such itineraries with their lists of caseríos (hamlets) and tambos would take on new significance over the next several decades, with their incorporation into militarized geographies of maneuver and speculative pathways for infrastructural development (e.g. Billinghurst, 1880). Bolivian forces would use the route twice during the early years of the War of the Pacific, advancing to the coast in 1879 and subsequently retreating after their 1880 defeat at the Battle of Tacna (Sater, 2007). Following the occupation of Tacna after the war, the new Chilean administration immediately targeted the route with a strategic rebuilding of the road (South Pacific Mail, 1923: 63), while efforts redoubled to realize the plans for a rail line connecting La Paz to Tacna or Arica that had been in circulation since the 1870s (Egan, 2019).

19Collectively these accounts – variously scientific, commercial, and military in focus – attest to the vital significance of this route for outsiders seeking to access the forbidding Bolivian altiplano and its resources. At the same time, such accounts are naturally unable to address many of the broader questions about the antiquity of the route, the nature of the many tambos between Tacna and the altiplano, and the cosmopolitan communities who made their livelihoods along this corridor. The archaeological investigation of the route, however, can provide an important complementary perspective.

2. The archaeology of the Palca-Tacora tambos

20Ahead of the opening of a new gold mine at Pucamarca and the improvement of the Tacna-La Paz highway, several sectors of the Palca district were surveyed by cultural resource management projects between 2006 and 2011. Over the course of these surveys, a series of four post-conquest tambos were recorded to the west of the Huaylillas passes (Cacéres Silva, 2006; Campos Napan, 2006; Mogrovejo Rosales, 2021). Several post-conquest tambos have also been recorded on the Chilean side of the border in the highlands of Arica (Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental, 2017). While recognized as significant, these sites have seen minimal research until recently with the primary focus placed on the preconquest archaeological sequence from the Archaic (Osorio et al., 2011) to the Late Horizon (Santoro et al., 2010).

21Between 2015 and 2018, a new archaeological project targeted the Palca-Tacora corridor and its tambos with the aim to understand the long-term history of the route across the modern international border between Peru and Chile (Chauca Iparraguirre, 2016; Corcoran-Tadd, 2019b). Combining remote sensing, intensive pedestrian survey, and targeted excavation, the project followed a palimpsest of abandoned roads, trackways (caminos troperos), and associated sites that began with the Inca Qhapaq Ñan and continued into the early 20th century.

22One of the major features of this archaeological landscape is a series of sixteen roadside structures from the 19th and early 20th centuries (Figure 4). Identified as historical tambos, these structures form a chain that extends from the upper Palca quebrada (at Chachacumani) to the pampas east and south of Tacora, where the road divides into a northern branch in the direction of La Paz (associated with the sites of Ancara and San Luis Ayro) and a southern branch in the direction of Oruro and Potosí (associated with the sites of Hospicio and Ancocalane).

Figure 4 – Map of the Palca-Tacora corridor showing the locations of the tambos identified in archaeological surveys in Peru and Chile, as well as the locations of mining operations at Tacora, Canaura, Colpitas, and Taapaca

Figure 4 – Map of the Palca-Tacora corridor showing the locations of the tambos identified in archaeological surveys in Peru and Chile, as well as the locations of mining operations at Tacora, Canaura, Colpitas, and Taapaca

(Map by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)

23This group of tambos can be situated within a wider network of sites beyond the project area but visible through both remote sensing and archival sources. Several tambos were located at lower elevations on the route between Tacna and Tacora: the tambos in the villages of Pachía and Palca noted by several travelers (Raimondi, 1864: 65-70) no longer appear extant, although the remains of the small tambo of San Francisco de Miculla (Raimondi, 1864: 66) are still visible within sector D of the delimited Complejo Arqueológico Miculla-Pachía. Additional unpublished tambo sites in the altiplano are located on the Oruro route at Tiacolpa and Changamoco (Redes Andinas, 2020) and on the La Paz route at Chulluncayani.

24At the regional level, there is a marked clustering of large tambos in the section between Copapuquio and San Manuel 1 (Figure 5). Excluding the site of Libertad C (partially demolished by modern road construction), the average size of the architectural cores of these sites is 864 m2. The tambos on the Chilean altiplano, by contrast, average only 363 m2 in area. Corral area at the tambos (Figure 6) shows an even more dramatic picture, with much larger corrals concentrated in the Copapuquio-San Manuel section of the route. Both patterns were likely driven by multiple factors: the location on a key point along the climb from the coastal plain to the altiplano and the vicinity to the mining sites of Tacora and Canaura. While an important rest stop for long-distance caravans, this cluster of sites may have seen much higher levels of investment as they took on the functions of both the tambo and the hacienda mineral, provisioning more permanent populations of mining laborers and pack animals.

Figure 5 – Map showing the area of tambo architectural cores (excluding outbuildings) on the Palca-Tacora corridor

Figure 5 – Map showing the area of tambo architectural cores (excluding outbuildings) on the Palca-Tacora corridor

(Map by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)

Figure 6 – Map showing the area of tambo corrals on the Palca-Tacora corridor

Figure 6 – Map showing the area of tambo corrals on the Palca-Tacora corridor

(Map by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)

25At the site level, the majority of the tambos recorded in the Palca-Tacora project share a broad range of specific features (Figure 7). Location – within several meters of abandoned trackways and at a significant distance from areas of denser settlement – is a common factor for all of the sites and forms an important element in their initial identification as tambos. The ground plans of the structures are typically rectilinear compounds with one or more patio complexes (central open spaces surrounded on two or more sides by room blocks). Most compounds show a particular focus on animal management, with large, formally constructed corrals (often occupying 40% or more of the total built area), reinforced gates, and troughs. The tambo compounds also often include large bread ovens and are occasionally associated with contemporary cemeteries (Copapuquio, Libertad A, Libertad B, La Portada, and Sicinara). Construction materials are quite heterogeneous, but tapia and/or adobe on stone foundations predominate and the patio spaces often feature cobbled pavements (Figure 8).

Figure 7 – Plans of the tambos at La Libertad A (Peru) and Ancara 1 (Chile), showing the similarities in plan and functional areas, the differences in scale, and excavation units

Figure 7 – Plans of the tambos at La Libertad A (Peru) and Ancara 1 (Chile), showing the similarities in plan and functional areas, the differences in scale, and excavation units

(Plans by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)

Figure 8 – Comparison of tambo construction techniques: stone with mud mortar at Ancara 1 (top); tapia walls and adobe gable at Libertad A (bottom)

Figure 8 – Comparison of tambo construction techniques: stone with mud mortar at Ancara 1 (top); tapia walls and adobe gable at Libertad A (bottom)

(Photos by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)

  • 10 See Chauca Iparraguire (2016) and Corcoran-Tadd (2017) for further analysis of the excavations at C (...)

26Despite previous suggestions that some of these sites were colonial in date (Ayca Gallegos, 2008; Campos Napan, 2006), there was a clear lack of association between the tambo architecture and prehispanic or colonial-period materials (whether in systematic surface collection or in excavation). While much more need to be done in constructing robust chronologies of glazed and industrial ceramic wares across the south-central Andes as a whole, traditional markers of the colonial era and the early 19th century – such as imported majolica and earthenware botijas (so-called olive jars) – were not recovered in contexts associated with tambo construction. Instead, the rich array of artefacts recorded at the tambos sites show a repeated pattern of dates clearly clustered in the 1870-1930 timeframe, including well-dated British ‘ironware’ ceramics and firebricks, Herman Heye glass bottles (Lockhart et al., 2008), and even a fragment of a bottle label bearing a ‘1904’ inscription. Subsequent occupations of the site are limited to their occasional reuse during the 20th and early 21st centuries as improvised shelters and corrals by local pastoralists.10

  • 11 Potential earlier dates are suggested by an inscribed date of 1819 at the cemetery associated with (...)

27Several smaller tambos (e.g. at San Manuel 2 (Alto) and Ancara 2) are much more similar in plan and construction to many of the recently abandoned pastoralist ‘estancias’ recorded across the study area and may represent slightly earlier roadside installations. Yet it must be noted that – in contrast to the four Inca tambos and the numerous caravan campsites also recorded along the corridor (Corcoran-Tadd, 2017; 2019a) – the associated surface scatters at these and the other tambos described here offer nothing to suggest pre-19th century occupations.11

  • 12 The tambo at Chachacumani may have also functioned as a small sulfur processing site in at the turn (...)

28One of the tambo sites – La Portada – stands out for its particularly complex sequence of architectural modifications, with the western sector of the site dominated by a series of six large, rectilinear stone structures (four measuring 5.5 m x 11 m and two measuring 4 m x 17 m) and piles of white powdery tailings (Figure 9). These structures are the remains of sulfur kilns used to process the ore from Tacora and other nearby sulfur deposits, constructed at the site around 1900 (Vargas Salcedo, 1902; Orrego Cortes, 1911: 341), and broadly resembling the ‘calcaroni’ design initially developed in Sicily during the mid-19th century sulfur boom (Figuier, 1873: 88). As the site’s construction sequence indicates, the core of the compound began as a tambo with subsequent expansions of installation associated with the rise of sulfur extraction at Tacora. The site was subsequently abandoned around 1914 as newer mineral processing facilities were constructed around the slopes of the volcano to take advantage of the new Arica-La Paz railway line (see Figure 4; Thomson, 2020).12

Figure 9 – View of two of the sulfur ovens at the La Portada tambo

Figure 9 – View of two of the sulfur ovens at the La Portada tambo

(Photo by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)

29Seven excavation units at three of the historical tambos (Copapuquio, La Libertad A, and Bellavista) targeted a combination of indoor spaces, patios, and kitchen middens to further explore the occupations and chronology of these installations. Midden excavations at Copapuquio and Libertad A uncovered densely stratified deposits of ceramics, glass, metal, animal bones and dung, botanical remains, and ash (Figure 10). Capped by hardened layers of eroded tapia and adobe, these units yielded the rich assemblages with high levels of organic preservation discussed further below.

30The excavation units (with areas between 1 and 4 m2) were excavated down to sterile soil when possible, allowed for full chronological control of the occupational sequences at the tambos. One of the deepest and most stratigraphically complex units targeted an interior space at the tambo of Bellavista (unit 2; see Figure 10), revealing pre-construction, construction, abandonment, and reoccupation phases. The lowest stratigraphic unit excavated (UE20), a layer of compact sediment and large stones lacking any anthropogenic features, was interpreted as the sterile deposit of the underlying quebrada terrace upon which the tambo was later constructed. An area of in-situ burning and associated ceramic fragments (botijas) and faunal remains (UE17 and UE19) was overlain by a series of flood deposits (UE16 and UE18), suggestive of an earlier open-air context, possibly a colonial caravan camp located at the edge of the quebrada terrace and at the junction of two routes through the Huaylillas passes. These were capped by a fill (UE14), compacted floor surface (UE13), and collapsed grey adobe wall (UE12), likely the primary phase of construction and occupation of the tambo, although the articulation of the floor and wall with current standing walls were not visible in the excavation. Dated firmly to the 19th century through associated transfer-printed whiteware and glass, this phase was succeeded by thick deposits of wall (UE11 through UE07) and roof (UE05) collapse. The superficial levels of burnt and unburnt animal dung (UE04 through UE01) speak to the site’s reuse by 20th and early 21st century pastoralists as a corral.

Figure 10 – Excavation profiles: a. Libertad A (northern profile of northeast quadrant of unit 2); b. Bellavista (western profile of unit 2)

Figure 10 – Excavation profiles: a. Libertad A (northern profile of northeast quadrant of unit 2); b. Bellavista (western profile of unit 2)

(Digital drawings by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)

  • 13 Historic Glass Bottle Identification & Information (2024) and Birks (2005) remain key resources for (...)

31As well as providing stratified sequences for building construction chronologies, the excavation units yielded highly diverse assemblages of material culture that provide important insights into the ways that highland lifeways both shaped and were transformed by both regional networks and new articulations with the world market (Figure 11). Most notable is the appearance of a wide range of whitewares at all the tambo sites, where they tend to form 20-40% of the ceramic assemblages. The large sample of whitewares and porcelains recovered from the tambo of Libertad A provides an instructive example: most are British in origin and are dominated by serving forms (plates, cups, and bowls).13 The assemblage is particularly heterogeneous in composition, and thus suggestive of piecemeal accumulation.

Figure 11 – Ceramic assemblages: a. British and French whitewares from Libertad A; b. locally-produced yellow-glazed coarseware from Libertad A; c. black- and brown-on-green glazed serving ware from Libertad A; d. British stoneware container for red currant jelly found near a caravan camp between Bellavista and Tacora

Figure 11 – Ceramic assemblages: a. British and French whitewares from Libertad A; b. locally-produced yellow-glazed coarseware from Libertad A; c. black- and brown-on-green glazed serving ware from Libertad A; d. British stoneware container for red currant jelly found near a caravan camp between Bellavista and Tacora

(Photos by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)

32However, the ceramic assemblages are not dominated by imported wares: the picture at Libertad A and the other tambos is complicated by the presence of unglazed earthenwares (potentially locally produced) and lead-glazed bowls (possibly produced somewhere in the wider Titicaca Basin [Arano Romero, 2019; Tschopik, 1950]). While it is possible to imagine the unglazed serving wares moving into circulation via local laborers and caravanners, the lead-glazed wares point towards the continued significance of regional market circuits that articulated a south-central Andean space. Much more work remains to be done to understand this important ceramic tradition that appears at sites across the wider region.

33As caravanners, travelers, mine workers, and overseers came together at the tambos, it is worth considering the ways in which quotidian foodways may have also involved new market dependencies and formed an arena for maintaining social boundaries (Pavão-Zuckerman & Loren, 2012). While serving wares form a large part of the surface and excavated assemblages, there are also indications of some of the diverse comestibles that formed the focus of activity at tambos and caravan campsites alike. The presence of new artefacts relating to exotic tastes (such as a stoneware jar for red currant jelly) may point to the less-visible roles of non-local (possibly coastal Chilean and Peruvian, English, and German) actors in these contexts. Just as Squier (1877) noted the repeated spatial segregation of elite travelers and muleteers at tambos along this route, so the vivid differences between whiteware and black-on-green lead-glazed plates may have reinforced social boundaries otherwise blurred in the extreme environment of the altiplano (compare Orlove’s [1998] discussion of the contested valences of earthenware in the ethnographic present).

34The ubiquity of bottle glass (primarily wine, whiskey, and gin) at both the tambos and at campsites across the survey area also points to the potential roles played by alcohol consumption (Figure 12). The histories of alcohol and market participation have a long and intertwined relationship in the central Andes (Deustua, 2000; Harris, 1989; Mangan, 2005), a relationship that was flux during the period of the tambos as new kinds of alcohol were increasingly becoming available. The glass recovered from the tambo middens suggests a substantial reliance on imported alcohol: while brandy continued to be produced in quantity in the coastal valleys of Moquegua, Tacna, and Arica (Rosenblitt, 2018), the makers’ marks also pointed to an array of overseas imports from Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands. The tambos would have formed important places for casual consumption, with Tschudi (1868: 187) commenting pejoratively on the drunkenness of fellow guests at the La Portada tambo. At the same time, the presence of substantial glass scatters at nearby cairns also points to the formalized consumption of alcohol in the form of pagos (payments), a tradition long associated with travelers and muleteers as well as miners across the wider region (Hirsch, 2017; Motta, 1987; Nielsen, 2000).

Figure 12 – Consuming alcohol at La Libertad A: a. stemmed drinking glass; b. base of bottle produced at the Hermann Heye Glasfabrik, Germany; c. fragment of gin bottle with partial inscription from Schiedam, The Netherlands

Figure 12 – Consuming alcohol at La Libertad A: a. stemmed drinking glass; b. base of bottle produced at the Hermann Heye Glasfabrik, Germany; c. fragment of gin bottle with partial inscription from Schiedam, The Netherlands

(Photos by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)

35The zooarchaeological assemblages analyzed from three of the historic tambos (Copapuquio, Bellavista, and Libertad A) are generally dominated by camelid (13-50% NISP) and ovicaprid (38-57% NISP) bones, with much smaller quantities of bovid remains (7-14% NISP). The presence of small numbers of viscacha (Lagidium) bones in the assemblages and the possibility that some of the camelid remains may represent wild guanacos both point to the likely role of high-altitude hunting in supplementing local diets. Other indicators such as the diversity of processing marks – camelid bones are mostly cut, cattle bones are mostly sawed, and ovicaprid bones show a mixture of both techniques (Figure 13) – are suggestive of provisioning both from local puna pastoralists and from other (possibly precordillera or coastal) suppliers. Plant remains recovered from the midden at La Libertad A (including maize cobs, squash seeds, olive pits, and peach pits) point to a similarly complex picture of food provisioning and consumption.

Figure 13 – Provisioning the tambo: a. camelid radio-ulna with cut marks; b. cattle vertabra with saw marks; c. selection of macrobotanical remains recovered from the primary midden at La Libertad A

Figure 13 – Provisioning the tambo: a. camelid radio-ulna with cut marks; b. cattle vertabra with saw marks; c. selection of macrobotanical remains recovered from the primary midden at La Libertad A

(Photos a. and b. by Patricia Maita; c. by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)

  • 14 Mine workers were in a particularly vulnerable position in the region: in Tacora in the 1920s, wage (...)

36Placed in a wider context, the dietary evidence from the tambo excavations suggests both a greater differentiation of foodways than might be seen at more isolated sites and potential tensions between the possibilities for self-sufficiency and dependencies on imported subsistence products likely controlled by tambo managers.14 Evidence from the primarily 20th-century sites associated with sulfur, salt, and llareta exploitation in the Atacama (Vilches et al., 2014; Vilches & Morales, 2017) shows a much greater reliance on imported meat (entirely from bovid and ovicaprid species) and canned goods. By contrast, Osvaldo Sironi (2019) has noted that 19th-century miners in the sierra of Mendoza found some self-sufficiency through hunting, although he emphasizes a much more limited and precarious diet overall. The relative diversity of food items at the Palca-Tacora tambos also suggest parallels with the much earlier assemblages recovered from the colonial tambo at Tarapaya, Bolivia (deFrance, 2003), which were shaped by the site’s similarly high degrees of connectivity and social heterogeneity, albeit with much less integration with local pastoralist communities.

37Several classes of finds point directly to the role of the tambos in provisioning regional mining operations. Most notably, fragments of sulfur ore were recovered in the excavations at La Libertad and Copapuqio, while small caches of ore were also recorded at the smaller site of San Manuel 2 (Figure 14). Several pieces of cupriferous ore and a possible blasting cap were excavated at La Libertad, likely tied to the nearby mining operation at Canaura. Bricks (common and firebrick types) were also recovered at some of the Palca tambos with markings indicating their import from English manufacturers (including Rufford of Stourbridge and Washington of Durham [Sallery, 2023]).

38Other finds point towards the wider set of productive activities associated with the roadside location of the tambo sites. Substantial quantities of leather clippings were recovered at La Libertad A, with a total of 3119 pieces weighing 3.9 kg excavated in the midden test pit, suggesting the presence of onsite leather crafting. The scraps include many repeated forms (e.g. long strips, triangles, and discs) and may represent the work of a craftsperson making and repairing equipment for the road (e.g. horse tackle, saddles, and saddle bags).

39Excavations at La Libertad A also recovered buttons (ceramic, metal, and mother of pearl) and bullet cartridges (multiple calibers including .44 with Smith and Wesson and Winchester Repeating Arms Company headstamps). Such small finds may indicate the presence of military units either during the War of the Pacific or during the subsequent Chilean occupation of the area (1883-1929). The tambo at Ancara had been allegedly sacked by retreating Bolivian forces in 1880 (Archivo Regional Tacna, 2003: 117) and the tambo of Chachacumani was transformed into a carabineros (military police) barracks during the subsequent Chilean occupation (AHVD, 1910: 216), in which case the other Palca-Tacora tambos may have been similarly requisitioned as the strategic corridor was periodically militarized.

40Finally, the dried and carbonized remains of llareta (Azorella compacta), a compact, high-altitude plant exploited as a fuel and for medicine, were also recovered at two of the tambos (Figure 14). Apart from small stands of queñua trees, llareta was one of the few local sources of fuel at these elevations and was the focus of intense exploitation for the use in ovens used to refine the sulfur ores arriving from the quarries of Tacora (Oficina Central de Estadística, 1912). It likely would have also been consumed at the tambos themselves (for cooking and the baking of bread) as well as stored for export down to the coastal valleys (with Kluger [1878: 32] noting that it was used as fuel even in the city of Tacna).

Figure 14 – Local raw materials at the tambos: a. fragments of processed sulfur ore; b. piece of unidentified copper-silver ore, likely from the nearby mine at Canaura; c. fragments of dried llareta (Azorella compacta) fuel

Figure 14 – Local raw materials at the tambos: a. fragments of processed sulfur ore; b. piece of unidentified copper-silver ore, likely from the nearby mine at Canaura; c. fragments of dried llareta (Azorella compacta) fuel

(Photos by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)

  • 15 As I have noted elsewhere (Corcoran-Tadd, 2017), archival hints at differential access to tambos an (...)

41Looking across these lines of evidence, one interpretive thread that remains particularly salient is that of the tambos as sites of provisioning. Rather than approaching the complex assemblages with large proportions of non-local materials in the traditional terms of a historical archaeology of consumption, provisioning forms a vital linkage to questions of mobility, dependence, and the reproduction of labor. In the harsh and often isolated context of the pre-cordillera and altiplano landscapes, these tambos formed sites that sustained the labor of logistics, mining, and mineral processing, while simultaneously giving considerable leverage to those controlling the movement of people, goods, and money through these nodal spaces.15

42It is hoped that further archaeological investigations examining these histories will continue at these and other similar sites across the wider region. Of the major empirical gaps in our current understanding of the region’s archaeology during the early republican period, two are particularly worth highlighting. First, we still know very little about the dynamics of ceramic production and circulation at the local and regional levels. Where were the abundant glazed wares found at the tambos produced and how widely did they circulate during the 19th and early 20th centuries? Can stylistic and petrographic analysis show if undecorated domestic wares originated nearby in the Palca, Ataspaca, or upper Lluta drainages or if they represented a wider catchment extending from Tacna into the altiplano (see e.g. Druc & Uribe Rodríguez, 2018)? What might this tell us about provisioning, food preparation, and mobility at the tambos?

43Second, there is much that might be learned from a careful analysis of the tambos within the wider context of the region’s vernacular construction traditions during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As well as providing further refinements of building chronologies through an attention to shifts in technique and material, such a study could illuminate wider questions of architectural style as a function of labor organization and communities of practice (Voss, 2008). Building on previous architectural research in the region (e.g. Contreras Álvarez, 1974; Muñoz Ovalle, 2014) that looks beyond the more established focus on the ecclesiastical vernacular (e.g. Fundación Altiplano, 2012; Apaza Mamani, 2016), future studies may be able to parse the ways that techniques and materials drew on both the domestic traditions of highland communities in flux and the new modes of industrial architecture circulating across the wider region. What forms of labor mobilization were behind the boom of tambo construction across the Palca-Tacora corridor? What is the significance behind the technical choices to build with stone masonry, adobe, tapia, or combinations of all three at the tambos and at neighboring communities of pastoralists, agriculturalists, and miners (see e.g. Chávez, 1998: 358-360)? How might this affect how we see theses rural tambos as relatively isolated enclaves dependent on caravan traffic and migrant labor versus as more heavily reliant on mobilizing resources and labor from neighboring communities?

3. Conclusions

44Recent archaeological research in the Palca-Tacora corridor has provided a much clearer chronology for shifting patterns of coastal-highland connectivity during the colonial and republican periods. Becoming an increasingly important alternate corridor up to the Bolivian highlands in the late colonial period, the Palca-Tacora route was initially constituted by a series of numerous caravan campsites with minimal formal investment. As traffic waxed and waned in the early decades of the post-independence period, several small tambos resembling modified estancias were likely established. But it was not until the 1870s and 1880s that the route saw a boom in tambo construction associated with the rise of the corridor’s importance for inter-regional trade, regional mining ventures, and new infrastructural projects. As this paper has shown, a strikingly dense chain of sixteen tambos were constructed during this period along a branching corridor extending approximately 60 km from an upper tributary of the Caplina to the altiplano of the Tripartito.

45This case also has wider implications for how we approach the story of Tacna, Arica, and the south-central Andes in the early republican era. At the macro level of analysis, such an approach must account for the exogenous forces of informal empire, extractive capitalism, and state building that remade the region over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries. At the same time, case studies such as this point towards the importance of addressing the levels of the regional (such as commercial networks, mining ventures, and infrastructural projects) and the microhistorical (e.g. site-level histories of labor, provisioning, and social conflict).

46With its attention to the built forms and material cultural assemblages at the Palca-Tacora tambos, the foregoing case helps us to better understand how some of the wider historical processes of the period played out in concrete, local ways that complicate more schematic narratives of the period’s history. As new commercial and extractive economies reshaped the south-central Andes over the course of the 19th century, they built upon pre-existing colonial routes and traditional modes of pastoralist mobility. While this landscape crucially enabled the provisioning of markets at an inter-regional scale, it also had important local effects. At the risk of being overly reductive, these economic booms relied upon a new ‘colonization’ of pastoralist lifeways, as high-altitude traditions – caravanning, camelid raising, llareta gathering – were re-mobilized as the logistical basis for new economic projects in a liberalizing south-central Andes (Vilches & Morales, 2017).

  • 16 The particular functions of the tambo as nodes of state power in the rural Andean landscapes of the (...)

47The early republican tambo was also based on the foundations of an institution with deep roots in the colonial period. At the same time, the new tambos in the Palca-Tacora corridor indexed some of the wider transformations of the late 19th century, with the role of many of these sites as roadside waystations increasingly mixed with the institutions of the hacienda mineral, the pulpería (general store), the military outpost, and/or the posta (post house).16 As such, they extended beyond the older functions of provisioning long-distance caravans and hosting petty trade to include the reproduction of new partly proletarianized mining labor, the logistics of new vertically-integrated enterprises combining commerce and industry, and the projection of state power.

48Within the new mining geography with its increasingly decentralized network of extraction sites and increasingly bulky mineral ores, tambos like those recorded in the Palca-Tacora corridor specifically took on new roles in the movement of ore and provisions across the fractured landscapes of the highlands. While the mid-19th century is often seen as the era of railroads across Latin America (with the Arica-Tacna line built in 1856 and the Mollendo-Puno line in 1874), animal-based infrastructures remained the basis for highland connections with the wider world well into the 20th century with the Arica-La Paz railroad line only opening in 1913 (Deustua, 2000; Egan, 2019; Langer, 1996). The massive corrals that characterize many of the Palca-Tacora tambos underline just how important mule and camelid caravans were to these inter-regional networks of industrialized mining.

49As suggested by their dense middens of glass, whitewares, glazed wares, and earthenwares, the tambos were also located within the new, emergent patterns of commerce and consumer goods, both as nodes in the long-distance trade networks between urban centers and as sites of provisioning and consumption themselves. Allowing for the near-monopolistic control over the supply of key goods in a remote region, these installations held clear attractions for outside entrepreneurs. But the evidence from both the excavations and the archives also suggest that we understand the tambos as complicated points of articulation between local communities, migrant workers, caravanners, and travelers, where globalizing commerce and highland lifeways met in new and often conflictive ways.

50The abandonment of the Palca-Tacora tambos is equally telling when it comes to understanding the relationship of local and regional processes: an abandonment horizon dating to the 1920s and 1930s characterized all the investigated sites and the causes of these abandonments were likely multiple. While the 1929 establishment of the new Chile-Peru border which severed the transportation corridor and the impact of the global depression were probably key factors, the opening of the Arica-La Paz railway in 1913 and local conflicts in the runup to the failed plebiscite in the 1920s were additional likely contributors to the decline of the Palca route and its tambos. A map made during this period by the international commission supervising the arbitration of a new border (Special Boundary Commission 1926) already marks the sites at La Libertad as a ‘deserted village’.

51The historical archaeology of Tacna (and the wider landscapes of the south-central Andes) remains in its earliest stages of investigation. Nevertheless, archaeological research on the Palca-Tacora tambos points towards the importance of understanding both the region’s long-term patterns of connectivity and the punctuated histories of adaptation, rupture, and resilience that characterize the past two centuries of occupation and mobility. Divided today by the often-fraught line of an international border, this landscape of abandoned waystations and mines remains an important testament to a shared history of extractivism, nation-building, and community resilience that continues to connect Bolivia, southern Peru, and northern Chile.

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Notas

1 The rather different trajectory of urban tambos – which persisted as commercial depots with warehouses and corrals in the centers of Tacna and Arica until at least the 1920s (see e.g. Silva Narro, 1913; Blaya Alende, 1921: 455) – remains to be further pursued in regional archives across the south-central Andes.

2 The late colonial/early republican trail network also connected La Paz to Moquegua; by the 1830s and 1840s, however, La Paz was increasingly connected to the coast via the Tacna route instead (see maps from 1839; 1842; 1848).

3 The dynamics of the Peruvian and Bolivian economies in the decades immediately following Independence have been the subject of considerable debate (Deustua, 2004; Langer, 2009; Mitre, 1981; Platt, 1997), with historical archaeological research remaining an untapped resource to shed new light on the mining practices, regional markets, and patterns of consumption that so rarely left traces in the documentary archive.

4 While known to non-locals since at least the mid-17th century (Barba, 1640: 10), the sulfur deposits at Tacora appear to have seen artisanal exploitation in the early 19th century with semi-industrialized operations beginning by the 1880s (Thomson, 2020: 6-9). Other mining concerns in the immediate Palca-Tacora area remained relatively small, with the copper mines at Canaura (possibly beginning in the colonial period (Acosta et al., 2011) and the borax quarry at Colpitas (1880s-) overshadowed by the operations at Tacora.

5 Throughout the 19th century, there were repeated attempts by state actors to use the Tacna-Tacora transportation corridor as a funnel through which to formalize commercial traffic of these goods (República Boliviana, 1864), with perennial concerns about the flow of contraband intersecting with the new state focus on national tax revenues and with local disputes over shifting regional market advantages (Rosenblitt, 2017).

6 In Tacna, two of the most notable cases of this broader pattern were the operations of the British-owned Hainsworth y Compañía and the Franco-German Blondel y Bogen ventures in the 1850s and 1860s (Ayca Gallegos, 2008; Rosenblitt, 2018).

7 Indeed, the endpoint for this paper’s periodization marks both a notable moment in the ongoing consolidation of a new informal hegemony in the region (with a final resolution of the Peru-Chile border dispute reached with United States oversight in 1929) and a nadir in international trade integration with the onset of the global financial crisis.

8 The complex histories of the ownership and leasing of tambos along the Palca-Tacora corridor remain to be fully elucidated. Ownership of the La Portada tambo, for instance, appears to have been in the hands of Blondel y Bogen (1850s through the 1870s), with a 1876-1880 lease held by the Cusicanqui brothers (Ayca Gallegos, 2008), before passing into the control of the Espada Donoso Hermanos mining firm by 1900 (Díaz Araya et al., 2016: 70). Comparison with the case of the Ancara tambo (held by Damaso Castillo of Tacna in 1882 [Archivo Regional Tacna, 2003: 117] before passing via the Quiroga brothers to Esteban Dondero, another Tacna merchant, by 1913 [González Cortez & Ruz Zagal, 2015]) points to a wider pattern of urban commercial firms targeting the Palca-Tacora tambos as valuable assets, with an increasingly influential role played after 1883 by the emergent Italian immigrant mercantile network centered in Tacna and Arica (Blaya Alende, 1921; Díaz Aguad et al., 2021).

9 Other noteworthy instances of 19th-century movement through the Palca-Tacora corridor are provided by naturalists (Franz Meyen in 1832 [1834], Hugh Algernon Weddell in 1851 [1853], Ernest Grandidier in 1858 [1861]), engineers and geologists (David Forbes in 1860 [1870], Edward D. Mathews [1879], Wladyslaw Kluger [1878]), military figures (General Agustín Gamarra in 1823 [Miller, 1829], Belford Hinton Wilson in 1840 [1978], José Vicente Ochoa in 1879 [1899]), and other travelers (Mathie Hamilton in 1827 [1864], Edward David Ashe in 1845 [1862], Charles Ledger in 1848 [Gramiccia, 1988], Juana Manuela Gorriti in the mid-19th century [1867], and Melchor María Mercado in 1868 [1991]).

10 See Chauca Iparraguire (2016) and Corcoran-Tadd (2017) for further analysis of the excavations at Copapuquio, Libertad A, and Bellavista.

11 Potential earlier dates are suggested by an inscribed date of 1819 at the cemetery associated with the La Libertad B tambo and the small numbers of botija fragments found in stratified deposits at Copapuquio and Bellavista, although both lines of evidence may represent pastoralist occupations and caravan encampments from the first half of the 19th century.

12 The tambo at Chachacumani may have also functioned as a small sulfur processing site in at the turn of the century (Harding, 1912: 48).

13 Historic Glass Bottle Identification & Information (2024) and Birks (2005) remain key resources for basic identification of most imported types of glass and ceramics. Alasdair Brooks and colleagues (2019) provide an important exploration of 19th-century British ceramics and their users in southern South America, a question that remains little explored across the Central Andes.

14 Mine workers were in a particularly vulnerable position in the region: in Tacora in the 1920s, wages were still paid through a combination of cash and credit at the company pulpería (Díaz Araya et al., 2016: 77).

15 As I have noted elsewhere (Corcoran-Tadd, 2017), archival hints at differential access to tambos and archaeological evidence for the persistence of informal caravan camps outside the formal spaces of the tambo point to additional inequalities.

16 The particular functions of the tambo as nodes of state power in the rural Andean landscapes of the 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly with respect to postal communications, customs revenue, and border control, still remain to be better studied on the part of archaeologists and historians alike.

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Índice de ilustraciones

Título Figure 1 – The Palca-Tacora corridor (highlighted by the white rectangle), the colonial ruta de la plata, and select secondary routes in the south-central Andes
Créditos (Map by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-1.jpg
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Título Figure 2 – Detail from a mid-18th century map showing the route connecting Tacna with Oruro and Potosí via the Palca-Tacora corridor (Mapa de los Obispados de Guamanca, Cuzco, La Paz e Arcebispado de Chuquisaca [c. 1760-1780], Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-2.jpg
Ficheros image/jpeg, 1022k
Título Figure 3 – Travelers’ images of the Palca-Tacora corridor in the mid-19th century: a manuscript drawing of the Chupiquiña volcano by Antonio Raimondi (1864: 74) and Ephraim Squier’s engraving of a mule train framed by the tambo and volcanoes of Tacora (1877: 252)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-3.jpg
Ficheros image/jpeg, 841k
Título Figure 4 – Map of the Palca-Tacora corridor showing the locations of the tambos identified in archaeological surveys in Peru and Chile, as well as the locations of mining operations at Tacora, Canaura, Colpitas, and Taapaca
Créditos (Map by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-4.jpeg
Ficheros image/jpeg, 1,4M
Título Figure 5 – Map showing the area of tambo architectural cores (excluding outbuildings) on the Palca-Tacora corridor
Créditos (Map by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-5.jpeg
Ficheros image/jpeg, 1,3M
Título Figure 6 – Map showing the area of tambo corrals on the Palca-Tacora corridor
Créditos (Map by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-6.jpeg
Ficheros image/jpeg, 1,2M
Título Figure 7 – Plans of the tambos at La Libertad A (Peru) and Ancara 1 (Chile), showing the similarities in plan and functional areas, the differences in scale, and excavation units
Créditos (Plans by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-7.jpg
Ficheros image/jpeg, 327k
Título Figure 8 – Comparison of tambo construction techniques: stone with mud mortar at Ancara 1 (top); tapia walls and adobe gable at Libertad A (bottom)
Créditos (Photos by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-8.jpeg
Ficheros image/jpeg, 1,9M
Título Figure 9 – View of two of the sulfur ovens at the La Portada tambo
Créditos (Photo by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-9.jpeg
Ficheros image/jpeg, 1,4M
Título Figure 10 – Excavation profiles: a. Libertad A (northern profile of northeast quadrant of unit 2); b. Bellavista (western profile of unit 2)
Créditos (Digital drawings by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-10.jpg
Ficheros image/jpeg, 391k
Título Figure 11 – Ceramic assemblages: a. British and French whitewares from Libertad A; b. locally-produced yellow-glazed coarseware from Libertad A; c. black- and brown-on-green glazed serving ware from Libertad A; d. British stoneware container for red currant jelly found near a caravan camp between Bellavista and Tacora
Créditos (Photos by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-11.jpg
Ficheros image/jpeg, 1,3M
Título Figure 12 – Consuming alcohol at La Libertad A: a. stemmed drinking glass; b. base of bottle produced at the Hermann Heye Glasfabrik, Germany; c. fragment of gin bottle with partial inscription from Schiedam, The Netherlands
Créditos (Photos by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-12.jpeg
Ficheros image/jpeg, 1,1M
Título Figure 13 – Provisioning the tambo: a. camelid radio-ulna with cut marks; b. cattle vertabra with saw marks; c. selection of macrobotanical remains recovered from the primary midden at La Libertad A
Créditos (Photos a. and b. by Patricia Maita; c. by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-13.jpeg
Ficheros image/jpeg, 1007k
Título Figure 14 – Local raw materials at the tambos: a. fragments of processed sulfur ore; b. piece of unidentified copper-silver ore, likely from the nearby mine at Canaura; c. fragments of dried llareta (Azorella compacta) fuel
Créditos (Photos by Noa Corcoran-Tadd)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/docannexe/image/16648/img-14.jpeg
Ficheros image/jpeg, 656k
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Para citar este artículo

Referencia en papel

Noa Corcoran-Tadd, «New tambos, old routes: the archaeology of mobility in the highlands of Tacna (AD 1830-1930)»Bulletin de l'Institut français d'études andines, 53 (1) | 2024, 119-153.

Referencia electrónica

Noa Corcoran-Tadd, «New tambos, old routes: the archaeology of mobility in the highlands of Tacna (AD 1830-1930)»Bulletin de l'Institut français d'études andines [En línea], 53 (1) | 2024, Publicado el 12 febrero 2025, consultado el 22 marzo 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/16648; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13bek

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Autor

Noa Corcoran-Tadd

PhD in Archaeology, Pre-Columbian Studies Librarian, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, DC

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Únicamente el texto se puede utilizar bajo licencia CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Salvo indicación contraria, los demás elementos (ilustraciones, archivos adicionales importados) son "Todos los derechos reservados".

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