Spell of the Urubamba: Anthropogeographical Essays on an Andean Valley in Space and Time

This work examines the valley of the Urubamba River in terms of vertical zonation, Incan impact on the environment, plant use, the history of exploration and the notion of discovery, the idea of land reform, and cultural contact with the European world. Winding its path northward from the Andean Highlands to the Amazon, the valley has served as the stage of pre-Columbian civilizations and focal point of Spanish conquest in Peru. "Gade left behind not only a superb body of scholarly work, but a network of colleagues and students who remain indebted to his example. This book should serve as an inspiration for all scholars who wish to pursue the Sauerian, counter enlightenment or post development agendas of understanding and respecting particular places in all their historical and cultural complexity, including ambiguities and contradictions." -- The Geographical Review, American Geographical Society

Table of Contents:
Preface.- The Urubamba Valley in Panoptic Perspective.- Urubamba Travelers as Generators of Knowledge.- Urubamba Verticality: Reflections on Crops and Diseases.- The Sacred Valley as a Zone of Productivity, Privilege and Power.- Vilca in Andean Culture History: Psychotropic Associations in Urubamba and Beyond.- Mysterious Ucumari: The Andean Bear in Nature and Culture.- Urubamba Ramble: Hiram Bingham’s Artful Encounter with Machu Picchu.- Vilcabamba: Fabled Redoubt of the Urubamba Region.- Highland and Lowland Peoples in Contact in the Tropical Urubamba.- Conclusion: The Spell is Cast.- Notes.- Glossary.- Index.

About the Author :
For more than 50 years and on four continents, Daniel W. Gade (b. 1936) has carried out research in cultural-historical geography. Regionally, his investigations have focused especially on the Central Andes on which he published two previous books and 50 peer-reviewed articles. In all of his studies, in South America and elsewhere, the author has integrated space, time, culture and ecology in order to elucidate the multiple dimensions of place. Taken together, his scholarly work manifests a keen intellectual curiosity, phenomenological imagination, polymathic exploration and self-reflexivity. Over the decades support for his fieldwork has come from the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, the Comité Conjunto España-Estados Unidos, the Social Science Research Council, several research Fulbright awards and the University of Vermont. Professor Emeritus Daniel Gade, taught geography at the University of Vermont for 33 years. At various times during that period hewas also a research fellow in Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and Cornell University and received residential grants from the John Carter Brown Library in Providence and the Camargo Foundation in France.

Review :
“This monograph on the Urubamba Valley—consisting of 354 pages, with several instructive maps and photographs—clearly contributes to a better understanding of the nature/culture gestalt in the southern Peruvian Andes. … Spell of the Urubamba is highly recommended to all those interested in Central Andean nature and culture.” (Andreas Haller, Mountain Research and Development, Vol. 38 (1), 2018) “Spell of the Urubamba is highly valuable as a unique type of reference work … . The book is lavishly illustrated. … Historians of geography and human-environmental scholarship, as well as researchers of diverse disciplines and interdisciplinary domains interested in Peru–such as archaeology, anthropology, agrobiodiversity studies, botany, ecology, ethnobotany, geosciences, history, and tourism studies–will find notes on undertakings in the Urubamba Valley of a number of well-known figures … .” (Karl S. Zimmerer, The AAG Review of Books, Vol. 4 (3), July, 2016)