Post-fire incising as a means of controlling esoteric knowledge in the Andean Formative

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Post-fire incision as method of surface "decoration" is extremely rare in the Central Andean region. This technique was used almost exclusively by the Cupisnique culture on the Peruvian North Coast during the Formative Period, primarily on ritual pottery. The technique was much more commonly used further north, in what is today Ecuador, where it was used on a wide variety of ceramic object types over many hundreds of years. Several Ecuadorian ritual materials and practices appear to have been adopted by the Cupisnique at the same time we begin to see other evidence for incipient social stratification on the Peruvian North Coast. I argue that the adoption of post-fire incision – almost always overlooked by Cupisnique scholars, who focus their attention on the iconographic and formal aspects of ritual pottery – actually provides a fundamental clue about sociopolitical dynamics during the development of complex societies in the Peruvian Formative. In this paper, I show how shallow post-fire incising could have been used by Cupisnique ritual specialists to control access to esoteric knowledge related to community well-being and claims to power, privileging a small group of incipient elites in this enigmatic society.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23391