Tell me how you write and I'll tell you who you are. Textualizations of the indigenous peasantry of the Puna de Atacama

Abstract

Archaeological and ethnohistorical textual practices regarding indigenous peasantry are analyzed. Both disciplines, along thier history, have defended their own specific methods of approaching the past against the methods of the other. We intend to show how, despite the differences noticed in those discussions, both disciplines are based on common cultural biases about their subject matter. For analytical purposes we use different texts from archaeology, history and ethnohistory of the Atacama Plateau fron the Castilian Conquest to the twentieth century, which are also confronted with the results of our own research. It is argued that academic discourses tell as more about who writes than about who is being described.