South America (Geographic Keyword)
1,201-1,225 (1,291 Records)
Past ontologies of Andean worlds have been reconstructed in relation to archaeological landscapes, objects, and contexts. Relational and animated worlds build on Andean concepts such as Apu, wa’ka, and Pacha, as well as Amazonian theories. In our case, we work with Amazonian perspectivism as a broad-based Amerindian ontology to analyze a case from Andean northwest Argentina. Perspectivism provides us with a radically different ontological premise for the world: things do not need to be animated,...
Towards an understanding of the transition from Paracas to Nasca from a household perspective: Interpreting changes in ceramic consumption at Uchuchuma (2015)
This paper highlights how the study of ancient dwellings and the activities that occurred within them can help archaeologists better understand the dynamic and complex nature of people, their relationships to each other, and the broader society they live in. In the Rio Grande de Nasca Region, Perú, Andean archaeologists assume that the Nasca (A.D. 1–700) developed directly from the Paracas (800–100 B.C.) based on the continuity of some pottery traits and settlement. While there has been...
Traces of Carib Ancestors: The Incised and Punctate Horizon Style in Eastern Amazonia (2016)
The Incised and Punctate Horizon style is a widespread late prehistoric ceramic series known throughout Eastern Amazonia. A variety of subseries are known from coastal and highland Columbia, coastal Venezuela, the Orinoco, the Antilles, the Guianas, the Southern Amazon, and the Lower Amazon, including Santarém. The Incised and Punctate horizon style may represent a second wave of Carib-speaking chiefdoms spreading throughout the tropical lowlands between A.D. 1000-1500. This paper presents...
Tracing stylistic influences in Chachapoya art and imagery (2015)
The art style of the people who occupied the territory called "Chachapoyas" by sixteenth century chroniclers and modern scholars reflects the region’s location straddling the eastern slope of Peru’s northern Andes and Amazonia. At various times in Andean prehistory the Chachapoya interacted with cultures to the north, east and west of their territory, while at other times they seem to have flourished in relative isolation. Given Chachapoyas’ location and apparent sporadic contacts, especially...
Tracing the movement of Quispisisa obsidian during the Middle Horizon, Peru (2016)
This paper explores variability in the consumption and distribution of obsidian within imperial and local Middle Horizon (AD 600-1000) contexts in order to address regional manifestations of imperial control and the role of resource extraction and regulation within the Wari Empire in Peru. During the Middle Horizon, the Wari Empire expanded and maintained control over the Peruvian Andes, often going to great lengths to import and export critical resources obtained from distant regions throughout...
Tracking Quartz: A Methodological Approach to an Elusive Type of Sources Using Chemical Characterization According to Their Geological Origin (2018)
In the archaeology of the Sierras Centrales of Argentina more than one hundred years ago studies reported the presence of a lithic technology centered on the use of quartz as a predominant raw material. However, little effort has been made to try to characterize its chemical composition so as to understand the circuits of mobility or the exchange networks in the archaeological sites of the region. The results of provenance studies have allowed us to advance in a geochemical characterization of...
Trade and Sacrifice: Osteometry, Skeletal Part Representation, and Paleopathology of Camelid Assemblages in the Central Andes (2017)
Chavín de Huántar is a complex ritual site widely recognized for its connections to other regional centers. While much of this regional interaction is understood based on common ceramic styles and designs as well as the presence of non-local material, much less is known of the actual mode of transportation. Llama caravans most certainly played a key role in the movement of goods across space during Chavín times. Were llamas for caravans raised in the proximities of Chavin? Were caravan llamas a...
Trading Tones: Exploring the Soundscape of Human Trafficking in Spanish Colonial Panama (2018)
Set in the World Heritage site of Old Panama (1519–1671), the House of the Genoese Slavery Memorial project brings together the lessons of over a decade of archaeological and archival research focusing on the ruins of one of the largest centers of human trafficking to have operated in Spanish America in the late 1600s. Building upon a growing body of literature addressing phenomenological approaches in archaeology and museum studies, this paper explores how an object-based reenactment of what...
Tranquilla site (PTF MLP 13): a critical evaluation of the Early Ceramic Tradition life style in the Choapa Valley (IVth Region, Chile) (2016)
It has been stated the groups ascribed to the Early Ceramic Traditions of the Choapa Valley had a mobile hunter-gatherer life style, representative of the archaic period. This is reinforced by the absence of permanent and long term occupations in the valley. This scenario suffered an interesting shift with the discovery PTF MLP 13, a domestic site associated to a cemetery that counts with an important stratigraphic deposit, great amount of ceramic sherds and milling stones. These findings...
Transformation and Continuity: Late Tiwanaku to Post Tiwanaku traditions in the Central Valley of Cochabamba (2015)
This paper presents evidence from the Central Valley of Cochabamba, a key peripheral region of the Tiwanaku state. It addresses Tiwanaku expansion, state collapse and post-Tiwanaku transformation and continuity using data from ceramic styles and other material culture traditions. Also presented are new radio-carbon dates from the Central Valley site of Piñami covering Tiwanaku expansion and collapse and how these dates fit into the larger regional context and suggest that Tiwanaku influence...
The Transformation of Long-Term Anthropological and Archaeological Engagements in Communities: Cases from Southern Manabi Province (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Working with the Community in Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the past 20 years, we have conducted research along the Ecuadorian coast in the province of Manabí. Over time, our work has evolved from that of strictly scientific issues to the incorporation of local community-based participatory research models. As other anthropologists have discovered, a continuous commitment with a research site leads to...
Transition from Hunting To Horticulture in the Amazon Basin (1970)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Travelers Stones. Highland and Coastal Interactions in Late Ritual Contexts at Pachacamac. (2015)
During the 2014 field campaign, the Ychsma Project (Université Libre de Bruxelles) has uncovered a small building decorated with murals in the Second Precinct of the site of Pachacamac, Central Coast of Peru. The floors of the building were covered with hundreds of various offerings, including many stones. These stones have shapes, colors and overall look very different from those present in the local geology. The study of the archaeological context and origin of these stones offers a new and...
The Treatment of the Dead in the Mid-Chincha Valley, Peru (2015)
This paper investigates post-mortem human body manipulation associated with above-ground and semi-subterranean tombs known as chullpas, which date from the Late Intermediate Period (A.D. 1000-1476) to the Late Horizon (A.D. 1400-1532) in the mid-Chincha Valley, Peru. Mortuary rituals are cross-cultural social processes that comprise a range of practices. One such practice is the treatment of deceased bodies which varies across time, space, and social organization. A 2013 survey of the...
Tree Ring Isotope Record of Climate Change at the Ramaditas site in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile (2015)
The Ramaditas archaeological site in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile provides evidence for cultural adaptations during wetter environmental conditions in an otherwise arid environment. From 2.0 – 2.5 kyr B.P., regional population increased and a cultural shift toward agricultural based communities occurred. Tree samples collected from the site provide a high-resolution record of increased water availability as recorded by tree ring oxygen and carbon isotopes. Prosopis tamarugo logs from...
Trophies of Violence: The Manufacturing and Processing of Human Trophy Heads at Uraca (2015)
Human trophy heads appear in the iconography of prehistoric Andean ceramics, weavings, and statuary as early as the Late Formative (400 BC – AD 100), and actual trophy heads are not uncommon bioarchaeological finds in south-coastal Peru. Human trophy heads were prepared by cleaving the head from the body, cutting the occipital and parietal bones to remove the brain, drilling holes in the frontal bone, and threading that hole with a carrying cord for display. At the Middle Horizon cemetery of...
Tuberculosis in Past Peruvian Populations (2017)
Due to its arid climate the Atacama Desert has an exceptional preservation of ancient biomolecules. In an archaeological context, this allows for genetic analyses of both past human populations and the infectious diseases they experienced. Pre-contact Peruvian cultures are among the first New World populations to show skeletal indications of tuberculosis, and recent molecular analyses have revealed that three individuals were afflicted with a rare zoonotic form of the disease acquired from...
Two Indian Crania from Peru (1968)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
A UAV-based approach for a cost-efficient documentation of agrarian structures in the arid Atacama area (N. Chile) (2015)
The paper summarizes the contribution of UAV to the documentation of a vast group of late Prehispanic agrarian elements (fields, irrigation canals) in the arid Atacama area (northern Chile). Taking advantage of the extraordinary preservation and visibility of fields, canals and other constructions, the general mapping of the area was based on a combination of visual interpretation of high resolution satellite images (GeoEye 1) and fieldwork. However, despite their high resolution, satellite...
"Um Lugar dos Antigos:" A Tiered Approach to Community-Driven Survey in Cultural Palimpsests of the Brazilian Amazon. (2017)
The Mouth of the Xingu River, on the Lower Amazon River, is a place of many histories. The edge of the Amazon Delta, it was the first Portuguese foothold in contemporary Northern Brazil, and later home to a "glorious" 19th-Century rubber boomtown. Centered on the city of Gurupá, the region was a major hub in the traffic of Amerindians and also marked the Western extent of African slaving networks in Luso-Amazonia. Part of the Cabanagem revolt, place of Amazonian Jewry, export center for forest...
Un nuevo patrón arquitectónico de la cultura Paracas en la sierra sur del Perú (2015)
En nuestras recientes investigaciones de la cultura Paracas en la vertiente occidental de los Andes del sur del Perú hemos encontrado un nuevo patrón arquitectónico, cuyo elemento básico lo constituye una estructura en forma de D, que se encuentra combinada en número de dos, tres y más elementos. En el caso ideal se forma un círculo perfecto, generalmente sobre una colina artificialmente modificada, y alrededor de un patio hundido. En el sitio de Cutamalla se han identificado doce complejos...
UNA NUEVA VISIÓN DEL ROL DE KUÉLAP EN EL VALLE DEL ALTO UTCUBAMBA (2015)
Nuestros trabajos en Kuélap han permitido la excavación de un centenar de estructuras circulares, densos rellenos, estructuras ceremoniales y secciones de la muralla exterior y la muralla del Pueblo Alto. Estas excavaciones han afinado una secuencia estratigráfica apoyada en una veintena de fechados de radiocarbono y permitido el hallazgo de diversos contextos que sustentan una nueva hipótesis respecto del rol del monumento. Estos estudios han concluido en lo siguiente: a) el monumento comenzó...
Understanding an Alternative Pattern of Coalescence: A Study of Architecture and Organization at a Non-fortified, Pre-Inca Town in Highland Peru (2017)
This study presents an analysis of the architecture and spatial organization at Maukallaqta de Nuñoa, a prehispanic site within the highlands of Peru dating to the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000 – 1450). Within the northern Titicaca Basin where the site is located, hillforts dominate the archaeological landscape during this time as a result of increased political fragmentation and social discontinuity. While these hillforts often display very little architectural investment other than their...
Understanding heterarchy: Landscape and community in the northern Calchaquí Valley, Argentina (2016)
This presentation explores landscapes of heterarchy, investigating the ways that past peoples inhabited a south Andean landscape. In the northern Calchaquí Valley of Argentina, before the Inkas, power relations were predominantly decentralized and spatially extensive. As a consequence, lived experience, the built environment, and the wider landscape both constituted and reproduced a distinctive social order and cultural logic. Using data from regional survey, I argue first for a habitus that...
Understanding the ceja de selva in relationship to the Central Andean coast and highlands during the Early Horizon (2016)
Andean archaeologists have long debated the degree to which the ceja de selva or eastern Andean montane forest was involved within the larger historical processes that led to the development of sociopolitical complexity in Central Andean highlands and coast. For some scholars such as Julio C. Tello and Donald Lathrap, the apparent tropical forest influence in Chavín iconography as well as the similarity of eastern slope ceramics to contemporary highland and coastal assemblages suggested that the...