Historiographical Debates in South American Studies

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Conceptualizing South America: Regions, Periodizations, and Archives
• Chapter 2 Colonial Legacies and the Making of Archives
• Chapter 3 Nationalism Revisited: State-Building, Populism, and Plurinationality
• Chapter 4 Dependency Theory: Canon, Critiques, and Renewals
• Chapter 5 World-Systems and Commodity Frontiers
• Chapter 6 Indigenous Agency: Resistance, Negotiation, and Intellectual Traditions
• Chapter 7 Afro-Latin Histories and the Politics of Race
• Chapter 8 Gendered Histories: Feminisms, Care, and the Household Economy
• Chapter 9 Postcolonial and Decolonial Approaches in South American Studies
• Chapter 10 Environmental Histories: Amazonia, Andes, and Extractivism
• Chapter 11 The Andes in Comparative Perspective: Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador
• Chapter 12 The Southern Cone Debates: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay
• Chapter 13 Brazil in Hemispheric and Lusophone Frames
• Chapter 14 Frontiers, Borderlands, and the Idea of the Nation
• Chapter 15 Urban Histories: Cities, Informality, and Citizenship
• Chapter 16 Rural Worlds: Agrarian Change, Land, and Peasant Movements
• Chapter 17 Religion, Missions, and Secularization
• Chapter 18 Science, Technology, and Development Narratives
• Chapter 19 Culture, Media, and Visuality: From Literature to Film
• Chapter 20 Sport and Popular Politics: Football, Bodies, and Belonging
• Chapter 21 The Cold War, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights Memory
• Chapter 22 Neoliberalism, Social Policy, and the Pink Tide
• Chapter 23 Migration, Diasporas, and Transnational Networks
• Chapter 24 Methods and Sources: Oral History, Quantitative Turns, and Digital Humanities
• Chapter 25 Research Agendas: Ethics, Collaboration, and Public Scholarship

This book surveys the terrain of historiographical debate in South American studies with graduate students and scholars in mind. It is designed as both a map and a provocation: a map because it charts major controversies that have shaped the field, and a provocation because it invites readers to revisit canonical claims with fresh questions, methods, and sources. Across the chapters, we foreground nationalism, dependency theory, indigenous agency, and postcolonial and decolonial approaches, while situating these debates within broader conversations about archives, methods, ethics, and collaboration.

Rather than offering a single narrative, the book presents constellations of argument. Nationalism, for example, is treated not merely as a nineteenth- or twentieth-century state-building project but as a set of claims about belonging that are continually remade at frontiers, in cities, on football pitches, and in courts. Dependency theory appears here as a living archive—criticized, revised, and repurposed to explain commodity booms, extractivism, and global inequality. We trace how these frameworks intersect with world-systems analysis and with newer attention to commodity frontiers, making visible the material underpinnings of political and cultural change.

A central thread is the insistence on indigenous agency. We examine resistance and negotiation, but also indigenous intellectual traditions that have shaped law, governance, and knowledge production. Similarly, Afro-Latin histories and the politics of race move from the margins to the center of analysis, connecting local struggles to hemispheric and Atlantic debates. Gendered histories—attuned to labor, care, reproduction, and embodiment—reframe familiar episodes and recast the boundaries between public and private, economy and household.

Postcolonial and decolonial approaches offer conceptual tools for probing power in knowledge-making: Who speaks for whom? What counts as an archive? How do researchers ethically engage with communities and institutions? These questions gain urgency in contexts marked by authoritarian pasts, human rights struggles, and ongoing disputes over land and resources. Environmental history, science and technology studies, and cultural histories of media and visuality further diversify the analytic repertoire, expanding what counts as evidence and where historians might look for it.

The book is organized to move between thematic debates and regional case studies. Chapters on the Andes, the Southern Cone, Brazil, Amazonia, and various borderlands highlight how national frames both illuminate and obscure. Attention to cities and rural worlds reminds us that space—urban neighborhoods, agrarian frontiers, river basins—structures contention and collaboration. By pairing historiographical syntheses with focused controversies, each chapter provides critical summaries and recommended readings to orient research agendas and guide seminar discussions.

Readers can approach the book linearly or selectively. Early chapters offer conceptual scaffolding and discuss archives and periodization; later chapters foreground specific debates—on authoritarianism and memory, neoliberalism and the Pink Tide, migration and diaspora—while returning to recurring methodological concerns. Throughout, we emphasize the value of mixed methods, from oral history to quantitative analysis to digital humanities, and we underscore the ethical commitments necessary for collaborative and public-facing scholarship.

Ultimately, the aim is not to settle debates but to sharpen them. By clarifying the stakes of major historiographical controversies and pointing to promising new directions, we hope to equip researchers to formulate incisive questions, to locate and interpret diverse sources, and to situate South American histories within global conversations without losing sight of local specificity. The chapters that follow offer pathways rather than prescriptions, inviting readers to contest, adapt, and extend them in their own work.

Histories of South America often begin with a question that seems simple until you try to answer it: what, exactly, is South America? Is it a continent, a cultural region, or a set of ecosystems and commodities that flow across political borders? The answers shape everything from research design to classroom syllabi, and debates about region-making have long animated historiographical discussions. Scholars have treated the continent as an arena for empires, a laboratory for republics, a supplier of raw materials, and a mosaic of indigenous polities, African diasporas, and migrant networks. Each framing suggests different periodizations, archives, and methods. This chapter explores these foundational choices, not as settled conventions but as active debates that continue to orient the field. By mapping how historians define regions, choose chronological markers, and assemble archives, we can better understand the conversations that will unfold across the chapters to come.

Regional designations are never neutral; they are shaped by language, empire, and the politics of comparison. The term “Latin America,” popularized in the nineteenth century, emphasizes Romance languages and colonial heritage, linking the region to Iberian empires and, at times, to European cultural lineages. It has been criticized for marginalizing indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples and for reproducing Eurocentric frameworks. “South America” typically centers the continent’s geography and often excludes the Caribbean, though many scholars argue for a hemispheric or Atlantic perspective that connects islands and coastal zones to continental dynamics. Other terms—“Tropical America,” “the Andean World,” “the Southern Cone,” “Amazonia”—highlight ecological zones or subregional histories. These labels have consequences. They shape where archives are built, what languages are prioritized, and which comparisons seem salient. A history of political violence may look different if framed as “Latin American,” “Andean,” or “Southern Cone,” because each category foregrounds distinct actors, sources, and temporalities.

One persistent debate concerns the most useful chronological boundaries. Periodization is not merely a pedagogical convenience; it signals interpretive commitments. Many textbooks still lean on three great divides: independence in the early nineteenth century, the transition from agrarian to industrial economies in the late nineteenth century, and the mid-twentieth-century rise of mass politics and welfare states. These markers reflect the experiences of republican elites, export sectors, and urban centers, but they can obscure rural timelines, indigenous cycles of resistance and negotiation, and long-term ecological shifts. Periodization often centers state-making moments—such as the collapse of Spanish and Portuguese rule—while underplaying continuities in labor systems, land tenure, and environmental exploitation. The result is a timeline that looks neat on paper but may not match the rhythms of communities on the ground.

To counterbalance such state-centric frameworks, some historians prioritize “deep time,” tying South American histories to paleoclimatology, archaeology, and environmental change. Scholars of Amazonia, for example, draw on terra preta soils and geoglyphs to argue for precolonial polities and landscapes that challenge the myth of a pristine wilderness. In the Andes, the expansion of the Inka Empire and earlier cultural horizons like Chavín or Tiwanaku offer alternative baselines for periodization, focusing on cycles of integration and fragmentation rather than European arrival. Afro-descendant histories of the Atlantic World encourage another timeline, one linked to the transatlantic slave trade, abolition, and post-emancipation labor regimes. Migrations—of Europeans, Africans, Asians, and later Middle Eastern and Latin American peoples—suggest additional rhythms and nodes. Thus, a robust historiography of South America often juxtaposes multiple clocks: political, ecological, demographic, and cultural.

The independence era remains a pivotal marker, though its implications are contested. For some, 1810–1825 signifies the birth of sovereign republics and the beginning of national histories. For others, independence is a transitional moment, accompanied by continuity in social hierarchies, landholding patterns, and colonial legal frameworks. Historians who focus on indigenous communities often emphasize the persistence of communal land tenure, multilingual governance, and negotiated autonomy, even after the collapse of imperial administrations. Afro-descendant scholars highlight the ambiguities of post-abolition citizenship, pointing to processes that began before independence and extended well into the twentieth century. Economic historians track how trade regimes shifted after 1808, when the Peninsular War disrupted Iberian markets, but underline longue durée dependencies on commodity exports and foreign credit. Periodization thus becomes a site of argument about causation and change, rather than a neutral timeline.

If independence is a contested node, the late nineteenth century’s export boom is no less contentious. Historians of the Southern Cone often emphasize the role of British capital, refrigerated meat, and immigration in transforming Buenos Aires and Montevideo into cosmopolitan hubs. Scholars of the Andes and Brazil point to guano, nitrates, coffee, and rubber, linking regional booms to global industrialization and imperial competition. This era is frequently narrated as a “modernizing” moment that brought railways, telegraphs, and new urban cultures, yet the same period witnessed violent land enclosures, indigenous dispossession, and coercive labor regimes. The “export-led growth” model has been criticized by dependency theorists and revisited by commodity frontiers scholars who analyze ecological extraction, frontier expansion, and the racialization of labor. Periodizing this boom as “modern” risks normalizing a developmental narrative; placing it in a longer history of extraction highlights continuities across centuries.

The mid-twentieth century is often cast as a time of mass politics, populism, and industrialization. In Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, charismatic leaders built broad coalitions around labor, urban consumers, and state-led development. In Bolivia and Ecuador, indigenous movements began to enter national political arenas in new ways, even while facing marginalization. The period is also linked to the Cold War, with U.S. intervention and military dictatorships shaping political trajectories, especially in the Southern Cone. Historians now increasingly complicate this narrative by attending to regional variations, such as the longer arc of indigenous activism in the Andes, or the persistence of rural power structures in Colombia and Paraguay. The mid-century is also a turning point for gender histories, as women’s suffrage, labor participation, and feminist organizing expanded. Rather than a uniform “populist” moment, the period can be seen as a palimpsest of overlapping projects, each with its own timelines and stakeholders.

More recent chronologies emphasize the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and 1990s, and the subsequent “Pink Tide” of left-leaning governments in the early twenty-first century. While these frames are useful for tracking policy shifts and political coalitions, they can compress the diversity of regional experiences. Brazil’s path under Lula and Dilma differed markedly from Argentina’s oscillations, Bolivia’s plurinational experiments, or Venezuela’s oil politics. Historians have begun to push against these shorthand labels, paying closer attention to how social movements, indigenous organizations, and feminist collectives built alternatives to both neoliberalism and state-centric populism. Environmental histories further recalibrate timelines by foregrounding long-term processes: deforestation, mining cycles, river management, and climate variability that transcend electoral periods and policy packages. Short-term political chronologies thus coexist with deep environmental time, creating a more layered sense of change.

In practice, many historians blend periodizations rather than choosing a single framework. A project on labor in the Andes might combine colonial continuities, an independence pivot, a late-nineteenth-century guano boom, mid-twentieth-century unionization, and twenty-first-century extractive economies. Studies of Amazonia often juxtapose precolonial polities, colonial missions, rubber booms, and contemporary deforestation. Urban historians track overlapping timelines of migration, infrastructure, and informality. This layering enables comparative analysis while avoiding rigid teleologies. It also helps align scholarship with the rhythms of communities themselves, which rarely observe neat chronological breaks. The result is a historiography that is comfortable with multiplicity, willing to treat chronology as a tool rather than a template, and attuned to the way different actors experience time differently.

Periodization is inseparable from the archive, and the archive is never neutral. South American historiography has long been shaped by colonial and national repositories: the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the Arquivo Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, and various national and regional archives in Buenos Aires, Lima, Sucre, and beyond. These institutions privilege administrative records, legal proceedings, and official correspondence, which tend to center state perspectives and elite actors. To be sure, these sources are indispensable for reconstructing institutional histories, policy debates, and legal regimes. Yet they can render subaltern voices faint or mediated. Historians have responded by widening the scope of what counts as an archive, incorporating parish records, notarial documents, maps, paintings, photographs, sound recordings, and oral testimonies. The expansion of the archive is both a methodological move and a political one, reflecting efforts to narrate histories beyond the state.

In recent decades, scholars have turned to the “counter-archive,” a concept that encompasses materials produced outside official channels. Oral histories, community archives, and indigenous language documents—such as Quechua and Aymara wills and petitions—have reshaped understandings of resistance, negotiation, and everyday life. Digital archives have broadened access, allowing researchers to compare ship manifests, plantation records, and newspaper databases across regions. Yet digitization raises ethical questions about ownership, access, and the politics of visibility. Communities that have been historically marginalized may prefer to control the circulation of their materials, particularly when dealing with sensitive topics like violence, land claims, or ritual knowledge. Historians increasingly collaborate with community organizations to co-curate archives and ensure that research benefits participants. This collaborative approach reframes the archive from a static repository to an ongoing social relationship.

Materials beyond textual documents also complicate and enrich the archive. Maps, paintings, and photographs offer visual evidence of landscapes, urban growth, and social hierarchies, but they also carry the biases of their makers. Music, oral performance, and ritual objects convey histories of movement, memory, and belief. Archaeological and paleoecological data provide material traces of settlement, agriculture, and environmental change. Sensory histories—attending to smell, sound, and texture—illuminate experiences of markets, ports, mines, and streets. These sources push historians to develop interdisciplinary methods, from sound studies to remote sensing. They also demand careful interpretation: visual and material culture do not speak for themselves but require contextualization and dialogue with living traditions. The broader the archive, the more nuanced the history, but also the more complex the ethical and analytical challenges.

Language is a crucial factor in archival research. Spanish and Portuguese dominate, but they are far from the only languages in which South American histories are recorded. Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní, Mapudungun, and numerous other indigenous languages appear in legal petitions, land deeds, and religious texts. Afro-descendant speech patterns and Creole languages surface in testimonies and folklore. Working with these sources often requires collaboration with linguists and community speakers, as well as sensitivity to translation’s interpretive moves. Even within Spanish and Portuguese, regional dialects, specialized vocabularies (such as maritime or mining terms), and historical orthography pose challenges. The choice of language not only affects access but also shapes the questions a historian can ask. For example, land disputes in the Andes are more legible when one can read Quechua titling documents, revealing networks of kinship and obligations that Spanish summaries might obscure.

Archives are also sites of political struggle. The legacies of authoritarian regimes, particularly in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil, have led to debates over access, memory, and accountability. Human rights organizations have built their own archives to document disappearances and violence, often challenging state narratives. In Bolivia and Peru, conflicts over mining and land have generated contested records, with communities and corporations producing parallel documentation. Indigenous movements have demanded the return of archival materials, including maps and ethnographic notes, asserting intellectual property rights over cultural knowledge. These contestations underscore that archives are not neutral storehouses but arenas where authority is negotiated. Historians must be attentive to provenance, chains of custody, and the politics of silence, recognizing that what is absent may be as significant as what is preserved.

The concept of the “archival silences” is particularly relevant for South American studies. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s insights about the production of silence in the archive resonate in contexts where enslaved people, indigenous communities, and women were systematically excluded from official records. Historians have developed strategies to address these gaps: reading documents against the grain, triangulating sources, and collaborating with communities to reconstruct memories and practices. For example, the history of domestic labor is often invisible in state archives but recoverable through oral histories, court cases, and advertisements. The history of environmental knowledge is embedded in indigenous oral traditions and visual representations rather than administrative reports. Recognizing and working with archival silences is an ongoing methodological commitment, not a one-time fix.

Digital tools have transformed the scale and methods of archival research. Text mining and network analysis allow historians to track commodity flows, migration patterns, and political affiliations across vast corpora. Geospatial mapping reveals the spatial organization of estates, missions, cities, and extraction zones. Databases of ship manifests, censuses, and newspapers enable quantitative approaches that complement qualitative analysis. These tools have facilitated comparative work across regions and periods, making it easier to connect local case studies to broader patterns. At the same time, the digital turn risks reproducing biases if the underlying data reflects archival inequalities. Digitization projects often prioritize materials in major repositories, leaving community-held archives underrepresented. Historians must critically assess the provenance and coverage of digital collections, and advocate for more inclusive digitization partnerships.

Another important development is the turn to public scholarship and collaborative research. Rather than treating archives as extractive resources, many scholars now engage communities as co-producers of knowledge. This may involve co-authoring articles, creating public exhibitions, or developing educational materials in multiple languages. In the Andes, historians have collaborated with indigenous organizations to document land claims and ancestral practices. In Brazil, researchers have worked with favela residents to record histories of urban informality and citizenship. In the Southern Cone, partnerships with human rights groups have shaped the study of memory and authoritarianism. These collaborations broaden the archive and enrich interpretation, but they also require rethinking timelines, funding structures, and the politics of authorship. The result is a more democratic historiography that recognizes diverse expertise.

The choice of sources shapes not only the content but also the form of historical writing. Narrative strategies—whether to write chronologically or thematically, whether to foreground individuals or structures—are influenced by the materials at hand. When working with oral testimonies, historians may adopt a more dialogic style, foregrounding the voices of interlocutors. When analyzing quantitative data, they might use tables and visualizations to illustrate patterns. The genre of history matters: a monograph, a public report, a digital exhibit, and a podcast each offer different possibilities for conveying argument and evidence. Students and scholars increasingly experiment with hybrid forms, integrating images, maps, and audio clips to convey the texture of historical experience. These experiments invite readers to engage with the archive in new ways and to consider the affordances and limits of different media.

The question of comparability is also central to conceptualizing South America. Historians often compare across national borders to reveal shared structures and divergent outcomes. For example, comparing the guano boom in Peru and the nitrate industry in Chile highlights how different governance models shaped resource extraction. Comparing Argentina and Uruguay illuminates divergent paths of urbanization and labor organization. Yet comparison can flatten differences or impose external frameworks. To avoid this, some scholars adopt a “connected history” approach, tracing concrete links—migration, trade, capital flows—rather than drawing abstract comparisons. Others emphasize “entangled histories,” showing how regions and communities are co-constituted through networks and frontiers. These approaches help anchor comparison in empirical connections and respect for local specificity.

Regional subfields provide useful vantage points for periodization and source selection. The Andes, for instance, is often studied through a combination of indigenous language documents, colonial legal records, and oral histories. Amazonia requires collaboration with indigenous communities and attention to ecological sources, such as pollen data or satellite imagery. The Southern Cone’s historiography is rich in urban archives, labor records, and media materials. Brazil’s vast documentary base includes plantation records, immigration files, and extensive governmental archives. Each regional corpus suggests different questions: agrarian change in the Andes, racial democracy in Brazil, state-society relations in the Southern Cone. By staying attuned to regional debates, historians can situate case studies within broader historiographical conversations without losing sight of local nuance.

Cross-cutting themes further complicate attempts to draw clean boundaries around South America. Environmental history insists that ecosystems do not respect political lines; the Amazon basin spans nine countries, and the Andes stretch across several. The Atlantic World frame connects the region to Africa and Europe, highlighting the circulation of people, commodities, and ideas. The Pacific frame links South America to Asia, particularly through trade in silver and later migration. Migration studies underscore the porousness of borders, with flows from Europe, Africa, Asia, and within the continent. These transnational frames suggest that “South America” is best understood as a set of interlocking nodes rather than a self-contained container. Historians use this insight to design studies that move across scales, from local neighborhoods to global circuits.

The question of language and audience also shapes historiographical debates. Anglophone scholarship often filters South American histories through theoretical trends from Europe or the United States, which can lead to tensions with local intellectual traditions. Spanish- and Portuguese-language historiographies have robust debates, terminologies, and citation practices that are not always legible to English-speaking audiences. Bilingual research and publication can bridge these gaps, but they require labor and institutional support. Translating concepts—such as mestizaje, indigenismo, or racial democracy—across linguistic and political contexts is an interpretive act, not merely a technical task. Historians who work bilingually often uncover nuances lost in translation, and they can more readily engage scholars and communities across the region.

Fieldwork and archival research intersect in productive ways. Many historians of South America combine archival work with site visits, interviews, and participant observation. Visiting a mine in Potosí, a port in Valparaíso, or a favela in Rio de Janeiro can illuminate the spatial and sensory dimensions of historical processes. These experiences can shape research questions and interpretations, offering insights that documents alone might miss. At the same time, fieldwork raises ethical considerations—how to enter communities respectfully, how to compensate participants, how to avoid extracting knowledge without benefit. Increasingly, scholars adopt community-based research protocols that align goals, set expectations, and ensure transparency. Fieldwork is not a supplement to archival research; it is a complementary method that expands the archive and deepens analysis.

Pedagogy is another arena where debates about region, periodization, and archives play out. In graduate seminars, instructors must decide which sources to assign, which chronologies to prioritize, and which regions to highlight. Textbooks and readers can inadvertently reinforce certain frameworks—such as a “nation-states” model that privileges Buenos Aires, Lima, and Rio—while leaving other regions and periods underrepresented. Instructors increasingly assign diverse materials: indigenous testimonies, visual culture, data visualizations, and podcasts alongside traditional monographs. These choices shape the next generation of historians and their research agendas. The goal is not to eliminate canonical works but to situate them within a broader, more plural archive and to encourage students to ask original questions that cross boundaries.

In practical terms, researchers often face constraints—time, funding, language skills, visa requirements, and institutional support—that shape what is feasible. These constraints are not merely logistical; they have historiographical implications. Archival access in some countries can be difficult, with limited hours or bureaucratic hurdles. Digitization has eased some pressures but introduced others, such as the cost of database subscriptions and the uneven coverage of collections. Language training is critical, and the learning curve for indigenous languages can be steep. Collaboration can mitigate these constraints by pooling resources and expertise, but it also requires trust and shared credit. Being honest about constraints and creatively working around them is part of the craft of history.

There are many ways to organize a history of South America, and no single approach captures everything. The choices scholars make—about region, periodization, and archive—set the terms of debate and open up particular lines of inquiry. A project organized around commodity frontiers will ask different questions than one organized around national political development. A study rooted in indigenous language sources will emphasize different actors than one focused on state records. Recognizing these choices is important because it allows readers to evaluate arguments on their own terms and to see where they might intervene with alternative frameworks. It also encourages humility: our maps of South America are provisional and contested, which is precisely what makes the field dynamic.

The chapters that follow build on this foundation by exploring major historiographical debates and new directions for research. Each chapter takes up a set of controversies—nationalism, dependency theory, indigenous agency, postcolonial approaches—and situates them within specific regions, periods, and archives. Together, they offer a toolkit for designing research, selecting sources, and formulating questions. Rather than presenting a single narrative, the book aims to equip readers to navigate multiple interpretive traditions and to make informed choices about their own projects. The goal is not to resolve debates but to sharpen them, with an awareness of the conceptual stakes involved in every historiographical decision.

For graduate students and scholars beginning new projects, a practical approach is to map three dimensions simultaneously: region, periodization, and archive. Start by articulating what you mean by “South America” in your study—whether it is a specific country, a subregion, an ecological zone, or a transnational network. Next, decide which chronological markers are most relevant to your research question, and be ready to justify why you include some periods and not others. Finally, inventory your sources: official archives, community collections, digital databases, oral testimonies, visual and material culture. Consider the ethical implications of each source and look for opportunities to collaborate with communities and institutions. This triangulated approach will help you craft a clear, rigorous, and original contribution to the field.

To make these choices more concrete, consider how different projects might look in practice. A study of guano extraction in nineteenth-century Peru might center on the Archivo General de Indias and Peruvian national archives, but also incorporate shipping logs, environmental data, and oral histories from coastal communities. A project on urban informality in contemporary Rio might rely on municipal records, ethnographic interviews, and photographic archives, while engaging digital mapping to visualize neighborhood change. A history of indigenous land tenure in the Bolivian highlands could combine Quechua and Aymara legal petitions, colonial surveys, and recent community archives, alongside satellite imagery to trace land use over time. These examples show how choices of region, period, and archive intersect to generate distinct lines of inquiry.

As you navigate these decisions, remember that South American historiography is a living conversation. New sources are uncovered, new methods are developed, and new voices enter the field. The concepts and frameworks discussed here—region, periodization, archive—are tools, not doctrines. They should help you ask better questions, not constrain your imagination. With this in mind, the rest of the book invites you to explore specific debates and to consider how your own research might contribute to them. Whether you are working on the Andes, Amazonia, the Southern Cone, or Brazil—and whether your timeline spans decades, centuries, or deep time—there is a place for your work in the ongoing project of writing South America’s histories.