Other History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

The Production Of Space: The Conception, Construction, And Contestation Of Colonial Cuzco, Hanna Le

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The imperial Inca Empire (1438 to 1533), Tawantinsuyu, which spanned Panama and most of western South America, was centered in Cuzco in modern-day Peru. After Spanish occupation in 1533, Cuzco began to transition from the former Inca capital into a Spanish colonial cuidad. Thus, in post-Conquest Cuzco, urban planning embodied important cultural and political messages. The brick and mortar of Spanish colonial edifices and the spatial layout of seventeenth-century Cuzco reinforced socio-ethnic order, imperial Spanish authority, and the supremacy of Christianity. However, the city’s inhabitants, Andean native peoples and Spanish colonizers, understood the symbolic and material significance embedded in ...