Paul Heggarty is a Researcher in the Linguistics Department of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His focus is on language history and prehistory, aiming to ensure that the perspective from linguistics is better understood outside that field, to contribute towards a more coherent, cross-disciplinary vision of the human past. Within interests that range worldwide, his specialism is in the indigenous languages of the Andes, particularly the divergence history of the Quechua and Aymara families. He was the lead convener of the series of interdisciplinary conferences on the Andean past that led to this volume, and its companion on the pre-Columbian period, Archaeology and Language in the Andes, co-edited with Andean archaeologist David Beresford-Jones.
Adrian J. Pearce teaches at King's College, London, in the Departments of History and Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies. He is a historian of Latin America, with research interests principally in the political, economic and cultural history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was co-organiser, with Paul Heggarty, of the symposium in which this volume originated, held at the Institute for the Study of the Americas in London in September 2008. He is currently completing a book on Spanish imperial policies in the viceroyalty of Peru during the early eighteenth century, while his new project looks at the phenomenon of reindigenisation in the nineteenth-century Andes.