Throughout the history of Latin America, people have often imagined and narrated visions of the region’s diverse Indigenous pasts. This panel examines how players in Latin America have constructed and mobilized understandings of pre-Columbian (pre-European-invasion) Indigenous pasts, and to what ends. Across a broad temporal range, the papers ask how, and with what consequences, different actors have drawn on community memory and/or material evidence to imagine Indigenous histories.

The first two papers take an explicitly comparative frame: in the early colonial viceroyalty of Peru, how did Spanish officials’ and Indigenous communities’ narrations of Inka and pre-Inka pasts differ? What evidence did different parties draw on, and to what ends? Anne Marie Creighton deploys archival and linguistic evidence to question the ways sixteenth-century texts applied European models of ethnolinguistic unity to an ethnically and linguistically complex province near Arequipa, Peru. Henry Bacha follows archaeological conversations into the archive, tracing the afterlives of Inka resettlement practices and the ways they shaped early colonial histories near present-day Ayacucho, Peru. The second two papers focus on the processes through which colonizing actors have understood pre-Columbian material histories. Considering cases from the central and northern Andes and from central Mexico, Jeff Baron asks how Spanish actors sought to acquire knowledge about Indigenous “treasures,” and he explores the imaginative and real-world consequences of their activities. Finally, Henry Bielenberg examines the intellectual history of archaeologies of Maya sites in Guatemala in the second half of the twentieth century, during the Guatemalan Civil War. What effects did apparently logistical changes to archaeological knowledge production have, not only on disciplinary trajectories of the archaeology of the Maya, but also on imaginings of Guatemala’s national history?