For many readers, the name Tom Dillehay evokes the archaeological site known as Monte Verde and recent theories about the peopling of the Americas. However, the present book, though published in “Cambridge Studies in Archaeology,” contains surprisingly little archaeological analysis. Instead, it is a truly interdisciplinary study of the development of social life since the 1500s in the Purén and Lumaco valley region, in modern-day Chile. Most of Dillehay's arguments here are based on his own ethnographic research and on ethnohistorical sources from the colonial period. The archaeological data he has gathered through numerous excavations remain in the background, and he promises a future book dedicated to that.
It is difficult to summarize such a long and rigorous book, but let me highlight two large problems the author intends to address. One is the social, political, and cultural aspects of mound building activities in this area, and their roles in the formation of what he calls—following colonial sources—the Araucanian “estado” (not to be confused with an actual state) that developed in response to the Spanish invasion. Dillehay's contribution here is not limited to the area under study, however, and will cast light on other mound building cultures.
A second objective of this book is to examine the notion of “complexity” as used in the archaeological literature and expose its limitations through analysis of the Araucanian or Mapuche case. One might question Dillehay's terminology: though he explains his choice of “Araucanian” to refer to the past societies formed by the people now known as Mapuche, one still wonders why he did not use the latter name, now preferred by heirs and representatives of that cultural tradition.
Dillehay argues the Mapuche were militarily defeated very late, in the 1890s. One thing he attempts to prove is a cultural continuity between the coalition or confederacy of patrilineages that successfully confronted the Spaniards and the Mapuche who now live in the Purén and Lumaco area. I came away convinced.
He reads between the lines of the Spanish chronicles to explicate ethnographic and archaeological data he has collected over three decades. His integration of ethnohistorical and archaeological findings demonstrates how one can draw on strengths of multiple disciplines to elucidate social and cultural organization and practices of indigenous peoples from the pre-contact period to the present. For instance, Dillehay's ethnographic investigations are crucial to clarifying significant discrepancies between archaeological findings and ethnohistorical sources: colonial chronicles make no reference to mound building, while archaeology reveals a mound-building boom circa 1500 to 1700. The chronicles nonetheless provide a wealth of information about colonial-period religious practices that coincide with those suggested by the archaeology, and Dillehay's ethnography confirms and adds to the picture (29). In this way, he amalgamates and makes sense of partial and spotty information from three disciplines, three forms of knowledge production.
A chapter co-authored with José Saavedra explores the explanatory power of ethnographic research (here collected from over two hundred informants over thirty years) regarding the meaning of both kuel (the Mapuche name for the mounds) and shamanic practices that still take place in them. His conversations with two machi (shamans) after they have performed a ritual, and others, help him to expound on a variety of topics (see esp. 257–67). For example, the way strong kuel absorbed, or “adopted” weaker, inactive ones appears to be related to how strong patrilineages absorbed weaker ones during chaotic and stressful situations during colonial times (259). Changes in social organization during that difficult period, and strategies for survival (e.g., development of a stronger, broader, and more centralized system of inter-lineage alliances), only partly visible archaeologically, are verified ethnographically.
I have touched on just a few of this seminal book's ideas. It is a major contribution to understanding the complexity of Amerindian societies in general, and mound-building ones in particular. It exemplifies how creative and rigorous combinations of ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and archaeological analyses can illuminate societies both past and present.
