摘要
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, indigenous communities in the Viceroyalty of Peru suffered forced resettlement, introduced disease, and onerous colonial tribute levies. These produced an onslaught of petitions for new tribute counts, as their diminished populations were obliged to pay the head taxes set by earlier censuses. The resulting visitas (administrative surveys) provide a wealth of information on the demography and agricultural systems of colonial Andean communities. However, comparatively little quantitative research exists on the distribution of agricultural resources and the nutritional demands of households. We model agricultural production and nutritional demand using household demographic and landholding declarations in the visitas from the Colca Valley of southern highland Peru, combined with ethnographically-derived estimates of agricultural production and nutritional demand. The results indicate that despite surplus agricultural production in the aggregate, there were significant differences in intra- and inter-community land wealth and production sufficiency ratios, leaving about 30 % of households with caloric shortfalls. In contrast to regional-scale carrying capacity-type models, this simulation characterizes agricultural inequality within colonial Andean communities, and thus accounts for the hardship evidenced by tributary recount petitions, even in a breadbasket province from which much surplus production was extracted to fill colonial coffers.