Papers presented at a conference held in Oct. 2002 at the University of New South Wales.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : first nations between conquest and independence / David Cahill and Blanca Tov� -- Writing two cultures : the meaning of "amoxtli" (book) in Nahua New Spain / Susan Schroeder -- The cosmological bases of local power in the Andes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries / Susan E. Ram�z -- Las mercedes que ped�para su salida : the Vilcabamba Inca and the Spanish state, 1539-1572 / Kerstin Nowack -- Some avatars of death in New Spain's southeast / Elsa Malvido -- Beyond the Indian/Ladino dichotomy : shifting identities in colonial and contemporary Chiapas, Mexico / Janine Gasco -- Indigenous production and consumption of cotton in eighteenth-century Chiapas : re-evaluating the coercive practices of the Reparto de Efectos / Kevin Gosner -- Recent studies on gender relations in colonial native Andean history / Nancy E. van Deusen -- A liminal nobility : the Incas in the middle ground of late colonial Peru / David Cahill -- A historical and cultural perspective on the 1814 revolution in Cuzco / Luis Miguel Glave -- A nationalist movement without nationalism : the limits of imagined community in Mexico, 1810-1821 / Eric Van Young.