Book Review: Magdalena de Cao: An Early Colonial Town on the North Coast of Peru by Jeffery Quilter

Abstract

In 1976, I co-authored an article on the Guevaví Mission site, founded in 1701, as one of the northernmost Jesuit missions in the American Southwest (Robinson and Barnes, 1976). My contribution to this article was the description and analysis of the material culture recovered in archaeological investigations (1964–1966). Like many other southwestern Spanish colonial mission sites, Guevaví had been the target of “treasure hunting,” casual surface collecting of artifacts, and post-Jesuit occupation disturbance, so “only broken, worn, or lost items remained” (Robinson and Barnes, 1976). Slightly more than 5,000 pieces of Native American pottery were recovered in excavations, but how much of this material preor post-dated this eighteenth century Jesuit mission was unknown. All of the imported ceramics (Mexico, Spain, and China), broken glass and beads, and metal fragments fit neatly into three archival drawers in the Arizona State Museum and did not exceed 100 items, or one half of one percent of the total number of recovered artifacts. As an archaeologist who has specialized in the research of Spanish colonial material culture, I was most interested in reviewing Jeffrey Quilter’s work on the colonial town and church of Magdalena de Cao along the Pacific coast of Peru to see how artifacts recovered from South America missions compared to those of North America. The differences between Magdalena de Cao and Guevaví were readily apparent in terms of size of occupation, environment, and the amount and variety of artifacts. Magdalena de Cao was originally the site of a major prehistoric Moche town and monumental huaca or earthen mound complex, located on the El Brujo Terrace adjacent to the Pacific Ocean. Decades of archaeological investigations on sites on this terrace was the basis for the development of a tourist facility, as this area appears to have been continuously occupied for as long as 14,000 years, and where in the last Book Review