Francisco García-Albarido

Francisco García-Albarido research how political-economic processes reshaped the socioeconomic structures of Latin-American local communities since the early modern era. One of his main objects of study is the interplay between colonial routes and market expansion in the South-Central Andes. In specific, Francisco is interested in how local communities engaged with the mercantile flow and made possible the market expansion, and how this participation crystallized new dimensions of inequality and consolidated new local elites. He is exploring these dynamics in the local communities that constituted the routes of Potosí both in Chile and Bolivia. Francisco earned a bachelor’s degree in archaeology at the University of Chile and a master’s degree in anthropology at Colorado State University. His professional experience includes more than a decade of survey, excavation and material culture analysis in the Atacama Desert and the Altiplano.