Thinking with Andean farming communities past and present: An Interview with Rebecca Bria

Dr. Rebecca Bria is an anthropological archaeologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Texas San Antonio. As the director of the PIARA archaeological project, her long-term commitment to communities in the northern part of the Callejón de Huaylas in north-central Peru allows her to collaboratively investigate how social groups emerge and transform through human-environmental interactions. In February, she visited Yale University as part of the Yale University Ancient Latin America Lecture Series to speak about Tradition and the Performance of Community: Ritual, building, and assemblages of value at Formative Period Hualcayán, highland Peru (2400–400 BCE). We spoke with her after about her work.

What led you to originally work in the Andes in general, and how then did you choose to work at Hualcayán in Ancash?

That’s a good question. Part of it comes from what I was exposed to as an undergraduate student and what I became interested in, and then what opportunities I had along the way. For me, when I became an anthropology student as an undergrad at Northern Illinois University, I didn’t really know if I was going to specialize in archaeology, but I was always really drawn to Indigenous American society, history, and prehistory. However, I ended up attending my first archaeological field school in Sicily before my senior year—since I have Italian heritage, I knew I would go when that opportunity came. But I then had an offer to stay at NIU for a master’s degree and do research in Peru’s Norte Chico region. It was such an incredible experience for me to be studying what I had long been fascinated with. That was my entry into Peru. Along the way, during and between degrees, I also assisted on various research projects in the Maya area and across South America, including Belize, Argentina, and Bolivia, but I decided my core research interests were still in Peru, specifically in the highlands, and so I began working with archaeologists Kevin Lane and Alex Herrera who were carrying out projects in highland Ancash. At the time I was looking to develop a PhD project and was seeking to investigate an area that few had studied yet deserved its due treatment for research. During my time working with Alex and Kevin I learned there was a lot of work to be done in Ancash, especially in the northern Callejón de Huaylas valley. I was also interested in researching early complex societies, and at the time there wasn’t much work being done on these early societies within the valley. I set off to do a survey, documented various sites, and ended up choosing two—Hualcayán and Pariamarca—that I excavated during my PhD. That research solidified my enduring focus on the northern Callejón de Huaylas, which is the Province of Huaylas, and I’ve been working in the same community called Hualcayán for about 12 years now.

The project, from its inception during your PhD, had this idea to emphasize a more collaborative approach. How have you involved the local community and, since you’ve now been working there 12 years, how has that involvement changed or could change in the future?

Number one, things are always changing. Every year the community faces new challenges. And if we’re concerned with how the community is doing, we need to respond and adjust to those concerns. From the beginning, I knew I wanted a project that wasn’t going to just go in, extract the data, and get out. There’s not always something wrong with that, but I was inspired by more community-based approaches in archaeology. I knew I also wanted to establish my research in a place I could build meaningful community relationships over the long term and feel like we’re working together towards a common goal. And yet, I chose to work in a community that did not have a standing interest in archaeology and heritage. That posed its own challenges that I felt were important to address in the sense of not telling local people that they should care about certain things that I care about. If we contextualize it within the colonial history, that heritage has been stripped away, starting early on when the Spanish forcibly removed people from their land. When I arrived, most people in the community saw no connection between who they are now and the people who built the ancient ruins found within their community lands. Also relevant to this is that the heritage of many Andean areas has been somewhat marginalized in the grand narratives distributed by the Peruvian state and reproduced in educational materials. That is, when kids are presented with the prehistory of Peru, it’s typically the Moche, the Inka, and so forth. And yet what they see coming out of the ground doesn’t look like a Moche or Inka pot. So having the opportunity to explore together what the remains are that we see eroding out of the ground in their village and what they mean in the contemporary world, that’s been an interesting process of discovery. Over the years my Peruvian colleagues and I have done different kinds of things together like a cultural heritage festival and hand-weaving enterprise. Some projects are successful, some fail to have longevity, but it’s the collective process of discovery that I’ve chosen to emphasize in my community work, because this is where value and meaning are generated.

It’s been interesting since the pandemic. Before, I had a pretty strong and consistent presence in the community – after all, during my dissertation research I was living there year-round for 3 years in addition to long stays in other years. But as I started writing and teaching I had to pull back to visiting for only a few months once per year. Then during the pandemic I didn’t visit for several years in a row. As I returned last year, I didn’t really know if people were still interested in having me there; priorities change, after all. But last summer I found the community was more interested and engaged than ever. In fact, I witnessed the strongest interest I had yet seen in the work we’re doing as archaeologists and what it can say about this place they live in and call home. For example, the terraces and canals that they’re using today, those were built by the precolonial community: its often been these kinds of archaeological features that provide a meaningful throughline from the past to the present in our discussions. Last summer my colleagues and I also did a 3D digital reconstruction of ancient temple spaces and used it to create a VR (virtual reality) experience for them. Those kinds of projects have also been helping to raise the engagement, specifically by inspiring the community to ask new kinds of questions about the local past. Like I said, it’s always back and forth in terms of what are we doing and where it’s all going, since we try to respond to community needs and interests. But it feels more than ever like our work and collaborations have taken root. But it took a decade of dedication and patience to really discover whether and how the community at large would find meaning in it.

You mentioned a VR experience, could you explain what it was and how you have brought technology into your project?

A lot of VR stuff in archaeology is for the general public and that’s all well and fine, as this can bring exposure to people and places that the global public otherwise wouldn’t know about. But my number one concern is thinking about local community engagement. Doing research on the Andean Formative Period, sometimes it’s very complex architecture that we excavate. And since we often expose only portions of any given structure, it can be quite hard to explain to a non-archaeologist from the community or elsewhere what it is we see and interpret from these incomplete data—especially if you have several thousand years of architecture half exposed in superimposed mound layers like we often do. I wanted a better way to bring the past to life, especially for the descendant communities I work with who have been disenfranchised from their history and heritage through colonialism, and saw digital reconstructions as one way to give community members better access to the experiences of the ancient people that lived on community lands. In 2022 I was fortunate to have a graduate student named Bruce Carlisle in my GIS class, as he has experience doing 3D modelling using Blender. I asked if he would like to come to Peru and work on a digital reconstruction project. I was excited to learn this was a career path he was aiming for and a collaboration was born. We went to Hualcayán last summer and started to digitally reconstruct a Kotosh temple for a VR experience prototype, whereby users would explore the temple and make an offering to its sacred fire.

We situated the 3D structure within a 3D panorama of the village today, which places users in space where the ancient temple is located. So, as people “walk” around the reconstructed temple using a VR headset, those who are familiar with the village layout immediately know where they are. And the reason I’m emphasizing this is because this was really engaging for local people as they exclaimed things like “Oh, that’s the waterfall, I know where I am! I’m standing atop Perolcoto (the local name for the ancient mound) but I’m seeing it differently, in the past.” It worked exactly as we hoped in this regard, and people were so excited to explore the ancient space. Digital technology and experiences like these, and I quote from something archaeologist Sarah Perry wrote about, is simply “enchanting”. It draws people in. We took it to the local school and the children loved it. But also the older community members, we’re talking over 60 years old, were very interested in all of it, to our surprise. In fact, in the community meeting where we debuted the VR experience, the elders were the only ones who wanted to get up and try it at first. Most of the young adults said “no” to trying it because they didn’t want to look silly. VR is a fascinating tool and our use of it is very experimental, as everything is in prototype stage at this point. Our goal in experimenting with VR is that we see it as a tool for building conversations with community partners, and in that regard it was successful, I think. There are certainly ethical concerns about hoisting digital technology on people—putting new technology on people’s heads, transporting them into a digital world they’ve likely never before seen. But it was a really positive experience, compelling me to move forward with the digital reconstruction and VR project, with the community’s interest and blessing, of course. Bruce and I, along with my graduate student Kalei Oliver, are currently working on next steps, and everything is coordinated with my co-director Erick Casanova Vasquez.

Is your plan for the future to also have a permanent VR headset that would be with the community for whoever is interested?

Yes, one goal is to have a community museum. This has been the goal for a long time because the community has always wanted a museum—we established one in 2014 that we are proud of, but it is small, with posters and a digital exhibit. There is a lot of work to do to make it a sustainable space. In terms of displaying artifacts from our research, that is more complicated. We keep all of our recovered artifacts in the village, in the lab house that we built, with the Ministry of Culture’s blessing. It makes me feel good that all artifacts stay local. But getting permission to have artifacts on display is a much more difficult process, typically because you need someone working full time who’s paid by the ministry and there typically aren’t funds for that at a community-level museum. So, we are thinking to go all-in on a digital-heavy museum, having both a VR experience and an AR or augmented reality-based site tour on tablets and cellphones. And community artifact collections can be incorporated into the exhibit as well. The community can charge visitors to enter or be taken on a guided AR tour of the site. And of course the community and local school can also use the space and tools themselves. There are tourists who come through Hualcayán to trek the Cordillera Blanca mountains, as the village is a known base camp. But there’s nothing for these trekkers to do for the day they are in Hualcayán before they start their ascent—typically these tourists stay in or near their tents for the day. The museum and site tour would give them something to do that would engage them with the community and its people. At the end of the day, creating the content for the community and having it there to use as an engagement tool is worthwhile, regardless of what the tourists get out of it, we believe.

Your research outside of the digital technologies is really bringing together people and their environment. Could you expand on how this helps you tell previously unknown stories of Andean prehistory?

In terms of who I’m interested in and who I’m studying in the past, it’s farmers I’m thinking about. In the contemporary community of Hualcayán, they’re farmers. In the ancient community, they’re farmers. The people who built the monuments and conducted the rituals that have long fascinated scholars of early Andean complex society—these people were farmers and I think that is important to remember. In fact, I was originally interested in the site of Hualcayán because it had what seemed to be ritual structures embedded into the ancient terraces in a way I had never seen before. That is, I had a sense that they were used for some ritual purpose before I excavated, and my excavations confirmed it. There is a ton of feasting evidence in these spaces, carried out by the Recuay society. People were feasting with the foods that they likely grew in the adjacent fields, and its equally likely that feasting in these fields was important for the agricultural practices carried out there, when thinking about labor mobilization and the actions needed to ensure fertility.

We often talk about feasting in terms of the person or people hosting the event, the people who come as guests, and how the feasts can do XYZ in terms of structuring society and labor relationships. But labor for what? What we see at Hualcayán is directly indexing agricultural practices. Societies don’t just feast with whatever’s available, they produce it; these are old conversations in anthropology. But my study at Hualcayán, where Recuay people were feasting directly within agricultural spaces, was an opportunity to understand how social, economic, ritual, and labor obligations articulated in a way that I feel data from other sites hadn’t really revealed. At Hualcayán you have this incredible example of Recuay people feasting with local agricultural products using effigy vessels that featured the bodies and faces of local ancestors, and all this is happening in distinct structures within newly built terraced fields. I am also interested in how the ancient community modified the land and shaped a local ecology through time. For example, there appears to be an artificial waterfall at the site, whereby ancient people brought water to Hualcayán through canals extending from a glacial lagoon that’s several kilometers away. So I’ve been thinking through these kinds of collective projects that created Hualcayán as we know it.

I was hired at UT San Antonio as part of a cluster hire for Social and Environmental Challenges in Latin America. And we’re now a Research Interest Group at the university, and this has led to several interdisciplinary collaborations. Funding permitting, I’ll be continuing a project that is focused more on contemporary climate change and the experience of living Quechua-speaking farmers in highland Ancash, Peru. It’s combining studies of glacial retreat and watershed change with ethnographic interviews conducted with the farmers who are experiencing the effects of climate change. And an archaeologal component reconstructs the history of ancient farming and how farmers are reusing ancient infrastructure and techniques. This is a big side project, but it’s an important one because it’s something that brings the long-term history Andean farming and land management through to the present day. After all, it’s the farmers who are going to sustain us through the experience of global climate change. We need to understand their experiences and identify and invest in the local methods that are allowing them to thrive. I strongly believe that climate-change studies need to be locally-situated; the Andean mountain ecology is unique, as are Andean farming practices. A solution to farming amid global warming that is developed in another world area may not be sustainable in highland Ancash, Peru. I find that my collaborative research on climate change work is one way I can bring together the concerns of farmers in the past and the present. If we can understand which farming practices had longevity and were sustainable in the past, or are currently working for farmers, we can be better prepared for what is coming.

How was your experience presenting at the Yale Ancient Latin America Lecture Series?

I was extremely honored to be invited to give a talk at Yale. I would have been honored to do it over Zoom, but having the opportunity to be flown out for a talk on the Ancient Americas was a really great experience. I was able to meet graduate students as well as faculty and learn about their research as much as share my own. This kind of opportunity, which allows you to engage with a single academic community like Yale archaeology is a rare thing, especially post-COVID. Presenting in-person and sharing formal and informal conversations with scholars who are interested in similar themes is priceless. Thank you for making it possible.

By Sarah Martini & Estanislao Pazmiño, Yale Anthropology Graduate Students and members of the Ancient Latin America Lecture Series planning committee