Parker Van Valkenburgh's book is an essential contribution to Peruvian colonial history, as it addresses a historiographical gap. Even though the literature that studies the process of reducciones de indios is becoming more extensive, what is not growing steadily are studies of local situations. In this sense, the book's most important contribution is to show the local conditions before, during, and after the reducción on the northern coast of Peru, particularly in Zaña. It is an example of how a process whose scope was intended to be global was localized.
This work dialogues with the most relevant publications of the last decade on the reducción general de indios, offering an innovative perspective in terms of theoretical and methodological approach. Van Valkenburgh understands the reducción as a discourse put into action during the campaign extended by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, specifically in the reorganization of various aspects of the native population's life, such as language and settlement patterns. However, the book's most solid innovation is the coherent articulation between the archival sources and the archaeological research. The archaeological data was obtained from the Proyecto Arqueológico Zaña Colonial (PAZC), where the author has been working and leading for several years. The archaeological information was critical to fill in the blind spots usually left by the written sources.
The book is divided into two parts. The first contains theoretical and conceptual approaches that lay the foundations of the research. In the first chapter, the author discusses how the idea of empire has been approached in different disciplines. He understands empire in a performative way as a set of discourses, institutions, and subjects that assert sovereignty over the population. He argues for an archaeology linked to environmental politics, because in this view everyday life is related to the environment within which people perform imperial power. The second chapter is the least innovative in terms of the topics it addresses. The conceptual approaches to municipio or policía have been addressed by the literature of legal history and political history in recent years, which the author did not consult.
The book's second part is the most relevant for the historiography because it concentrates on the local conditions of the northern coast of Peru. In the third chapter, the author recounts the environmental conditions and social relations developed in the periods prior to the reducción, from the Moche, Chimú, and Inka administrations to the visita of Gregorio Gonzales de Cuenca. The fourth chapter is, in my opinion, the most important of the book. It is a methodological example of using data collected in archaeological research in dialogue with archival sources. The study of three colonial occupations (Carrizales, Mocupe viejo, and Chérrepe viejo) shows the set of interests and objectives, both imperial and particular, in dispute during the location of the reductions in that particular context. The fifth chapter shows, in the long perspective, how the discourse introduced with the reducciones permeated the relations among the native populations and between the native populations and colonial institutions in the years following this process, even where the original reducciones had been depopulated.
In conclusion, I consider Van Valkenburgh's book to be an innovative research achievement on the process of reducciones de indios in the viceroyalty of Peru during the late sixteenth century, and it is built on solid empirical foundations. It is a book that every scholar researching the Spanish empire or Colonial Latin American history should consult.
