When the Saints Go Marching In: Religious Place Making during the Early Spanish Colonial Period in the Central Andes, 1532–1615

Although Christianity continued making steady inroads within Andean communities in the former Tawantinsuyu over time, elements of indigenous religious practices endured alongside Christianity, as they do to the present day (Andrien 2001:155). In terms of distance, Spanish colonization of South America and the Andes was at the limits of what sixteenth-century technology would permit (Sheridan 1992:153). As a result, while the attraction of riches and lands was a persistent lure to wannabe adventurers, the reality was that during the first three-quarter century of colonization of the Andes, the number of Spaniards actually on the ground was limited (Cook 1981); indeed,