The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

Testimonies 87
embitterment of Spanish-Makiritare relations leading to a successful rebellion
in 1775 has condensed into the mythicized figure of the evil
Fafiuru (espanol pronounced in local phonology). The story of a miraculous
journey to the lake of heaven recalls in mythohistoric diction the
Makiritare renewal of trade, this time via a Dutch seaport in Guyana.
Because the colonial record in some parts of South America is among the
world's longest, and because from the 1560s onward Spanish organization
placed literate persons inside the hearths of many thousands of communities,
the prospect of finding synchronisms with local tradition is reasonably
favorable.
Sometimes testimonies not meant to set forth a chronological history
do so unintentionally. Such information, unconsciously imparted and
therefore relatively light of ideological cargo, can be retrieved by analytical
readings. Max Uhle's South American disciples realized this from the
1920s on, when propounding onomastic analysis ("the etymological
method," focalizing names of places and people). A series of methodological
errors casts a shadow over this work. Onomastics can, however, be
modernized with appropriate linguistic and statistical controls. The ensemble
of names of persons or of places in, for example, a tribute
inspection or a census forms a natural distribution of cultural artifacts
comparable with the distribution of archaeological artifacts over a landscape.
Like a ceramic distribution, an onomasticon can be analyzed to
reveal continuities and discontinuities in time and space. In northern
Peru, two recent studies have linked linguistic regularities in place names
to prehispanic cultural movements rarely accessible via archaeology or
the overt layer of colonial texts. Changes in distribution of personal
names reveal how post-Inka Ecuadorians appropriated Inka name elements,
or how nineteenth-century Paraguayan nationalism undercut
Guaranian expressions of personhood.
Perhaps the strongest link in the connection between native and
exterior accounts of the past will eventually emerge from historical archaeology.
Accounts of Inka roads and waystations in the chronicles have
been closely matched to remains on the ground. Probably the most
complete archaeological-documentary synthesis occurs in Arno Kern's
exploration of Jesuit missions in Guarani lands. A few important earlycolonial
documentary reports, such as those describing deepwater seafaring
based at Chincha, multiethnic coca exploitation in the Chillon
Valley, the trading of "axe-monies" and "shell-monies" through wide
swaths of the continent, and the long-distance traffic in Spondylus shell
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