From AD 1550 to 1850, the Araucanian polity in southern Chile was a center of political resistance to the intruding Spanish empire. In this 2007 book, Tom D. Dillehay examines the resistance strategies of the Araucanians and how they used mound building and other sacred monuments to reorganize their political and culture life in order to unite against the Spanish. Drawing on anthropological research conducted over three decades, Dillehay focuses on the development of leadership, shamanism, ritual, and power relations. His study combines developments in social theory with the archaeological, ethnographic, and historical records. Both theoretically and empirically informed, this book is a fascinating account of the only indigenous ethnic group to successfully resist outsiders for more than three centuries and to flourish under these conditions.
• A new anthropological approach to the study of mound-building cultures in prehistory • The first extensive English-language study of the Araucanian indigenous people of South America • First time in world anthropological literature that ritual narratives have been collected between shamans and mounds or monuments
Contents
Introduction; 1. Purposes, settings, and definitions; 2. Shaping analogical and conceptual perspectives; 3. Araucanian prehistory and history: old biases and new views; 4. Imbricating social, material, metaphorical, and spiritual worlds; 5. The ethnographies of kuel, narratives, and communities; 6. An archaeological view of kuel and rehuekuel; 7. Contact, fragmentation, and recruitment and the rehuekuel; 8. Recursiveness, kinship geographies, and polity; 9. Epilogue and dying mounds.
Review
Review of the hardback: '… I recommend this book to readers interested in South American archaeology and ethnography, as well as to those interested in other mind-building cultures … an empirically rich contribution to explorations of heterarchy, political economies and 'corporate' polities in prehistory. The book should stimulate creative thinking about shamanism, mound-building and the nature of political ties in other mound-building societies both in the ancient New World and further afield.' Cambridge Archaeological Journal
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