Spell of the Urubamba

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 he was 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.

The valley of the Urubamba River, winding its path northward from the Andean Highlands to the Amazon, has been the stage of pre-Columbian civilizations and a zone Spaniards, when they came to Peru, coveted. In that valley setting, this work examines vertical zonation, Inca impact on the environment, plant use, history
of exploration and the notion of discovery, the idea of land reform, and culture contact. These and other themes offer a perspective on what it means to put things in their place.

"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)