It is impossible to tell the story of the struggle to conceive of, and build, modern nation-states in the Andean region without first considering the power of its alpine topography to shape and challenge human endeavors. As Karen Spalding eloquently showed in her study of colonial Huarochirí, “the relationship between human groups and their environment in the Andes is basic to any understanding of the patterns of Andean society.” Archaeologists have marveled at the unique ability of Andean civilizations to exert “human mastery over global extremes in environmental conditions” – spanning mountain, marine, desert, and jungle ecologies, all of which required distinctive adaptive strategies. The brilliance of Andean civilizations, culminating with the Inca, was precisely their ability to harness the extraordinary ecological diversity in this part of the world and to turn it to their collective advantage under centralized systems of rule. By setting this context, we are also reminded of the millennial history of human adaptation and florescence in the Andes, even as indigenous cultures were profoundly transformed under successive states, including the Inca and later the Spanish. This was no pristine social landscape of permanent tribes or pure ethnicities. Long before the Europeans invaded the Andes in 1532, Andean chiefdoms inhabited a world of constant flux, tension, and transformation during the dizzying expansion of the Inca empire, Tawantinsuyu.

Beginning in the 1530s, the Andes were drawn onto the unifying stage of Western imperialism, followed by three centuries of colonial rule under Spanish absolutism.