La Fiesta de San Antonio de Padua

This past June 11-14 was the Fiesta de San Antonio de Padua. We attended the festival as part of PAVA’s continuing documentation and efforts to share observations of the yearly cycle of festivals and cultural traditions in the town of Andagua and the Southern Peruvian Andes. In Andagua and several surrounding highland communities, San Antonio de Padua is the patron saint of muleteers (arrieros) and llama herders (llameros) (though this is not the case for all the world).

The Fiesta de San Antonio is a well-attended festival in Andagua, beginning Saturday afternoon with much feasting, music and dance. Community members and musicians parade through town playing music, singing and dancing in the street while they walk to varying homes where everyone enjoys one another’s company and spends time eating, drinking, dancing to celebrate the festival, its history and the beneficiaries supporting the festival. The festival is also often coordinated with a wedding and the wedding couple also feature prominently as beneficiaries and recipients of the good will of the festival. The community, as always, exudes generosity. 

During the festival community members dress and dance as arrieros or llameros. For much of the festival, the llameros lead the dancing and procession, adorning colorful textiles and hats with a matching suit underneath. They also carry the hides of small llamas, dancing and singing in Quechua. Similarly, the arrieros carry the materials they would bring with them – packs, pots, pans, and a stuffed animal of a dog, their traveling companion. In the past and continuing today, both llameros and arrieros lead long-distance caravan trips following ancient and new roads that traverse the Andes. Here again, the paths and muleteers and llama herders exemplify the tangled legacies of Spanish colonialism and pre-Hispanic traditions and histories.

Nestled in the high mountains bridging the coast and the rest of the Andes and jungle, this region of the Southern Andes, like many other areas, is known for the important role trade and caravans played in shaping the fabric of Andean lives. San Antonio is the patron saint of varying practices and traditions across the world, with his celebration in the Andes demonstrating how local influences shape world religions.

Then Sunday morning the community takes the altar and figure of San Antonio, decorated in the belongings of an arriero, and parade to the limits of town where a small stone chapel and large walled plaza stand dedicated to San Antonio de Padua. The plaza and chapel lie on the folds of a sloping and abandoned terrace hill that rises from the town up to the pampa (highland plains). An ancient stone staircase leads people up to the plaza. The earth and stones have melted and slid along the folds of the hill leaving the staircase uneven and sloping, revealing a living landscape shaped by human and natural forces. The chapel is also compelling for PAVA since it is situated at the edge of one of the largest archaeological sites in Southern Peru, recently documented by PAVA 2015.

San Antonio spends the day at the chapel in his name, waiting until mass is held there in the afternoon. More community members gather in the plaza for mass, including other arrieros as well as llameros who have arrived with several llamas. The llamas congregate in the corner of the plaza, occasionally wandering away, only to be herded and regrouped by the llamero swinging a rope sling. The setting offers a striking resemblance to pre-Hispanic and colonial open-air church plazas, and in contrast to the enclosed walled spaces of churches.  When the mass ends San Antonio is carried back to the church, and now accompanied by llamas.

Night descended as we walked from the Chapel of San Antonio returning it to the main town church. On the way the procession stopped at another church that lies at the edge of town. This is the church of San Antonio. In the plaza in front of the church there is a small statue of a horse and mule with bags loaded on it adorning a fountain; it is a church for the arrieros. The effigy of San Antonio enters the church, and soon departs promenading around the entrance to the church before returning to the plaza and main church. More fireworks are set, as the llamas jaunt around the plaza before soon returning to their homes in the higher valleys and puna that are just below the towering mountain peaks and volcanoes, such as Coropuna.

The festival continues for another day. While festivals offer compelling glimpses into local practices and traditions, they do not explain entire social lives. Festivals mark and accent daily rhythms articulated with yearly and seasonal changes, as local community members continue with the hard daily work. And, PAVA is dedicated to learning more about and tracing the histories of the daily practices and traditions in Andagua that have both endured and changed over time and continue to do so.

Project Update

It has been a busy and productive year for the project, though it may not be accurately reflected here on the webpage. So over the coming days and weeks we look forward to updating the blog and sharing the recent accomplishments, contributions, and collaborations of the project and what we have all learned about Andagua: its histories, presents and futures.

This includes sharing our research with the community and academic seminars through talks and papers, completing varying fieldwork activities and working to finalize our analyses. 

Currently, our project is analyzing the final artifacts of the collection to complete the comprehensive artifact analysis from survey and excavations (begun in 2015). We have analyzed over 10,000 artifacts recovered during months of fieldwork in the Andagua Valley.


Special thanks goes to team members, local community members and officials, Ministry of Culture, and many other organizations and people who have supported PAVA throughout the years.





(Contact Alex Menaker if you are interested in specific project data, publication information, and project reports, or any other project related questions).

Entrevista con geografa, Blaise Murphy

Here is a recent feature on the great work, geographer, Blaise Murphy (University of Denver) is contributing to the project and our knowledge of the valley!

Aqui esta una entrevista con geografa Blaise Murphy (Universidad de Denver) y su trabajo en el Valle de Andagua y con el proyecto!

(Click on the image or link to see the story on the University of Denver website. Haz click en el imagen o link para ver la historia...)

http://news.du.edu/digging-in-the-dirt

LA FIESTA DE SAN ISIDRO Y LAS YUNTAS EN ANDAGUA

This past weekend (May 14-16) was the Fiesta de San Isidro (Festival of Saint Isidore), the patron saint of farmers, and otherwise known as the Fiesta de las Yuntas (Festival of the Plows) in Andagua.

In recognition of San Isidro the community holds mass at the chapel in his name. The chapel is perched at the east edge of town, with the valley floor disappearing to meet Lake Andagua below and setting in relief the distant mountainside. A large cross stands next to the chapel and path, and is freshly adorned with flowers from the recent festival of the crosses. There is a stone pathway that descends into the valley cut through by a recently constructed road as it winds down the hillside. The valley below is a mosaic of stepped terraces curving throughout the landscape creating spectrum of greens, yellows and browns, and dotted by trees. It is an impressive human-modified (anthropogenic) landscape; a testament to the deep pasts and human work continually transforming the landscape. The stone path offers a direct, steep staircase down into the terraced valley, though it quickly dissolves into the road, reappearing as traces here and there along the way. Such stone paths continue to traverse the valley, varying in their histories, and remaining extent and uses.

Leading the mass, a Franciscan monk recounts San Isidro’s antiquity and while he was a man of many occupations, foremost, he did not own his own land, and thus worked as a hired hand for a wealthy landowner.

Like San Isidro, most of the community of Andagua is dedicated to maintaining and working the valley's terraces. So on the celebration of this saint, the community of Andagua pays homage to the beasts of burden who provide for them and with whom they share the fields. 

The tangled Spanish colonial legacies of plants, animals, ideas, practices (e.g. “cultures and religions”) pre-Hispanic pasts inform and are transformed through contemporary and historical traditions. Today there are three sets of yuntas (6 bulls, 2 bulls for each plow), and community members often comment on the dwindling numbers of yuntas. Now much of the community uses a shared tractor that can descend into the valley with the wide roads that wind down the valley.

Following the mass, the band struck a resounding note, the crowd gathered, and following the bulls leads (in turn wrangled by pairs of men), the observers walked along the dirt road between stone homes with thatched roofs to the plaza, where they returned the figure of San Isidro to the church and prepared to dance late into the night.

The celebrations also involved drinking beer from bull horns and sharing chicha (corn beer) (the vessels for choice beverages, most often alcoholic, are an important feature in festivals and ritual practices for all different cultures throughout the world and history, and exemplified in the pre-Hispanic Andes with the use of k’eros and other vessels). The festival continued through Sunday and Monday, with more yuntas involved.

(traduccion en espanol ya viene)

Copyright © Alexander Menaker

Proyecto Arqueológico del Valle de Andagua

Based in the Southern Peruvian Andes, the Proyecto Arqueológico del Valle de Andagua (PAVA) is an international, archaeological research project dedicated to studying the cultural and environmental histories of the Andagua Valley and its local inhabitants. 

Ubicado en la parte sur de los Andes Peruanos, el Proyecto Arqueológico del Valle de Andagua (PAVA) es un proyecto internacional de investigación arqueológica que es dedicada al estudiar las historias de las culturas y el entorno del Valle de Andagua como también de sus habitantes locales.