About LOGAR
General Editors
- Steven A. Wernke (Vanderbilt University)
- Akira Saito (National Museum of Ethnology, Japan)
Past General Editors
- Jeremy Mumford (Brown University), 2015-2016
Senior Programmer
- Winona Salesky
LOGAR is a geographical index and map of places relevant to Andean studies. It is organized as a map of place locations, and as an alphabetical index of places. Place pages compile information from primary and secondary source materials. Users may browse both located and unlocated places. To date, LOGAR has focused on establishing a comprehensive map of the towns established during the mass colonial resettlement program known as the Reducción General de Indios (General Resettlement of Indians) of the Viceroy Francisco de Toledo. The Reducción forcibly resettled about 1.4 million native Andeans into over 1,000 reducción (literally, “reduction”) towns. Reducciones were founded during the Visita General (Toledo’s tour of inspection and resettlement) between 1570 and 1575. The scope of LOGAR is initially limited to the area under most direct jurisdictional control of Viceroy Toledo—specifically, the audiencias of Lima and Charcas.
The concept of place is central to the organization of LOGAR. Following the conventions of another online culture-historical gazetteer, the Pleiades Gazetteer of the ancient Mediterranean world, LOGAR defines places as "geographical and historical contexts for names and locations" [1, 2]. Places may refer to discrete, locatable features in the physical world, such as a town or road. But they are not only such features. Places can be entities without discrete spatial footprints, or any geographical, spatial, or historical context that is imbued with human experience. This place concept is most closely associated with the geographer Yi Fu Tuan [3].
Thus, places are not (or at least not only) locations; places may be diffuse, discontinuous, or otherwise un-locatable. LOGAR takes the editorial position that such instances should be located approximately (and indicating as such) when possible, with iterative locational revisions as new information is contributed by the LOGAR community. Certainly, not all places in the archival texts of the colonial Andes refer to bounded spatial entities. For instance, a repartimiento most often referred to an ethnically-identified population granted in encomienda (a trusteeship of indigenous labor) to a Spanish encomendero (trustee). A repartimiento could comprise the population of a single reducción town, several reducción towns, or parts of several reducción towns; in such cases, families within the same reducción belonged to different repartimientos.
Very few maps survive from the sixteenth-century Andes, and places are almost never precisely located in colonial archival textual sources. Places are instead most often "located" by their names (toponyms), which may or may not have been coevally or subsequently mapped or survived to the present. In cases in which a place is not yet or cannot be located in LOGAR, its entry is listed in the alphabetic listing of places, with no corresponding location on the map. Each place entry cross-references instances of its mention in textual sources. As a practical matter, this concept enables inclusion of places that are not (at least currently) locatable, or preferably not represented as discrete points or features on a map. Therefore, some places cataloged in LOGAR are not currently located, but they may be in the future, as knowledge expands and as scholars contribute to LOGAR.
LOGAR builds directly on the open source code base and architecture of the Syriac Gazetteer. LOGAR is extensible (spatially and temporally), and over the long term, aims to serve as a more general repository and research tool of broad utility to the scholarly community of the Andean region.
- [1] http://pleiades.stoa.org/places
- [2] http://sgillies.net/blog/1055/whats-an-un-gis/
- [3] Y. Tuan 1975, “Place: An Experiential Perspective,” Geographical Review, 65:151-165.
