Republic of Ecuador (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Jeffrey Frost.

Chiriquí Period (700-1500 CE) archaeological sites have been the subject of systematic scientific research for more than 50 years. However, archaeologists are only recently beginning to define and understand regional and temporal variations in artistic styles, settlement patterns, and village organization.  In this paper, I summarize emerging patterns in village placement, cemetery organization, and the construction of public space. Continuities in the elements of constructed spaces, such as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Summer Moore.

Archaeologists increasingly emphasize the role of social and cultural context in understanding how indigenous groups in colonial settings appropriated foreign goods. While documentary accounts of explorers, traders, and missionaries have long been used by Pacific historians to examine foreign trade in Hawaii’s early colonial period, archaeological sites from this period have rarely been identified. As a result, we know little about how foreign goods acquired through such exchanges were actually...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jo Burkholder.

Data from excavations at the site of Pisanay, a Late Intermediate Period "sanctuary" with some remains of Early Intermediate Period ceremonialism, can be used to frame a sort of "before and after" picture of Middle Horizon developments in the Sihuas Valley of Arequipa and the changing nature of cultural ties to the region. Most striking of these is the shifting pattern of materials ties impacted by the intervening influence of the Wari cultural horizon, seen in the ceramics and textiles...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Noa Corcoran Tadd.

This is an abstract from the "Lost in Transition: Social and Political Changes in the Central Southern Andes from the Late Prehispanic to the Early Colonial Periods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite excellent work in the field over the past two decades, the tensions between continuity and rupture in archaeological accounts of the colonial ‘transition’ in the Andes have tended to remain under-theorized. Drawing on recent fieldwork in Tacna...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Summer Moore.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While researchers once considered the residents of hinterlands as the passive recipients of social and cultural influence, scholars have increasingly reframed these regions as dynamic zones of innovation and creative adaptation. Hinterlands have often been mentioned in investigations of indigenous sites in the context of European colonialism. Still,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adolfo Gil. Gustavo Neme. Ricardo Villalba. Jacob Freeman.

The Late Holocene archaeological record of central western Argentina shows a mosaic of human strategies, ranging from farmers to hunter-gatherers. This presentation evaluates if differences in subsistence practices among groups in a similar biophysical environmental generated different demographic and socio ecological responses to climatic change over the last 3000 years. We use radiocarbon dates as a proxy for human population size and growth rates and 13C and 15N stable isotopes on human bone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Mantha.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Round House: Spatial Logic and Settlement Organization across the Late Andean Highlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late Intermediate settlements in the Rapayán/Tantamayo region are distributed in two main ecological zones: quechua/suni between 2500 to 3900 m.a.s.l. and puna above 4000 m.a.s.l. The majority of residential sites occupy the quechua/suni ecological zone. These settlements display a fairly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Scattolin. Leticia Cortés.

The most ancient metallurgy of pre-Columbian America originated and evolved in the Andes, reaching great levels of technical sophistication. However, as a few interesting cases of these first moments of experimentation with metals come from Perú, with them comes the popular idea that any technical advance took place in the Peruvian Andes. Because complex societies later emerged in what is now Central Andes, there is a tendency to think that all technological innovations did as well. This could...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Osores.

This is an abstract from the "From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The goal of this paper is to review the influence of Bradley J. Parker on household archaeology in the Andes--with an emphasis on the North Coast of Peru--based on papers, hundreds of conversations, and future ideas. Parker and I started to work on common projects together in 2014. From my point of view, Parker´s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ani St. Amand.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a complex climatic phenomenon that has shaped both the environment and human behavior on the North Coast of Peru for millennia. Currently, El Niño, a component of ENSO, occurs every 3-8 years. Often associated with heavy rains that penetrate this normally arid coastal desert, ENSO brings flooding, erosion, and an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Penfil. Kelita Pérez Cubas.

The Pisco Valley was an important node for the Inka empire’s control of what is now the southern coast of Peru, as evidenced by the presence of the large Inka administrative center of Tambo Colorado. This valley additionally would have been a strategic location for sociopolitical and economic exchanges between the Inka empire and the Chincha kingdom, whose capital is located just to the north in the Chincha Valley. This preliminary research utilizes survey data and GIS analyses to examine access...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Ogburn.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient empires relied on warfare to conquer other groups and incorporate them politically. However, they did not always resort to armed conquest and often annexed new territories through negotiation backed by the perception of the empire’s military strength, which also underpinned the consolidation and perpetuation of political control in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Weston McCool.

Warfare was a significant sociopolitical practice throughout the Andes during the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1450). A salient research topic within broader investigations of conflict is how populations cope with chronic warfare. This article utilizes statistical and GIS-based analyses of architectural features and settlement patterns to reconstruct defensive coping mechanisms among fortified settlements in the Southern Nasca region of Peru. Specifically, this research evaluates how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Cramb. Victor Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polynesian atolls are often viewed as outlying provinces or "outer Islands" as compared to larger high islands. These often remote and diminutive coral islands are, and were, home to relatively small populations. Many coral island groups trace ancestry to, and had sustained contact with, high islands. These past connections and modern sociopolitical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Greig. Richard Walter.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of ‘hinterland’ encompasses ideas of distance, marginality and challenge and is often contrasted with ‘core’, which in turn implies centrality and resource richness. In this paper we address the applicability of both these concepts in New Zealand and examine their role in understanding long-term Maori history. We suggest that high...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mariusz Ziolkowski. Jacek Kosciuk. Bartlomiej Cmielewski.

This is an abstract from the "How Did the Inca Construct Cuzco?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper stresses the importance of surveying precision for any studies related to inca architecture and urbanism. Based on 3D laser scanning of the Coricancha complex, different cases are presented. The first case is an evaluation of hypotheses regarding the possible astronomical function of this temple. Among them, of particular importance is the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matt Edwards. Weston McCool.

Global studies of ancient imperialism are beginning to focus on the importance of communication corridors (roads, canals, waterways, etc.) in the origins, formation, and expansion of empires. As the number of such corridors increase and intertwine, a network is formed on the landscape that many past empires, including—we believe—the Wari, augmented with considerable imperial investment. By constricting the number of reasonable overland routes, mountainous terrain can concentrate such imperial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Swenson.

This is an abstract from the "A New Horizon: Reassessing the Andean Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000) and Rethinking the Andean State" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his analysis of Shang authority structures, Campbell attacks the search for ancient states in the archaeological record as founded on “an illusory and anachronistic projection of modern political contingencies” (2009:821). Indeed, a narrow focus on rational leadership strategies or the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvina Castro. Gustavo Lucero. Valeria Cortegoso. Marsh Eric.

Based on geo-archaeological studies on the Argentine–Chilean border in the southern Andes, a method is proposed for ranking lithic sources based on the quality of the material, cost of accessibility, and location along travel corridors. In the upper Las Taguas river valley (northwestern San Juan Province, Argentina, 5500–3700 masl), 32,622 lithic artifacts from 30 sites were analyzed to study the variation in the use of seven lithic sources between 10,000 and 500 cal BP. We ranked the time...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Roberts.

In this paper, major focus will be given to metal artifacts and fragments, examined with respect to object type, production technique, and their distribution throughout different architectural spaces during the 2017 excavations of Patipampa, a domestic sector of the Middle Horizon (AD 500-1000) city of Huari. These artifacts, collected during excavation and flotation, will be compared to finished products and fragments belonging to other artifact classes, such as shell, across multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Penfil. Patrick Ryan Williams. Marie Elizabeth Grávalos. Lauren Monz.

This paper presents preliminary analysis and interpretations of a craft production space located within a single residential patio group on the summit of Cerro Baúl, located in the Moquegua Valley of Peru on the Wari- Tiwanaku frontier. Excavations in a patio group located close to a Tiwanaku temple exposed a dense artifact midden which included obsidian points and debitage, shell and lithic beads, burnt ceramics, and bone. Evidence of subfloor offerings, marked by multiple cuy internments in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Ochoa-Winemiller.

This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper focuses on the regional role that two artisan communities, Chichicaste and Dos Quebradas, played as producers of pottery and obsidian blades within regional exchange networks. Chichicaste pottery has been recovered from many Honduran sites as well as from El Salvador and northern Nicaragua. The wide distribution of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicola Sharratt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Techniques derived from analytical chemistry are critical to examining the impact of macro political change on the production and circulation of craft goods in the past. LA-ICP-MS analyses of objects and the raw materials used in their manufacture in the Moquegua Valley of southern Peru have been directed at reconstructing patterns of production and exchange...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicola Sharratt.

This is an abstract from the "Communities of Practice in the Ancient Andes: Thinking through Knowledge Transmission and Community Making in and beyond Craft Production" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In many regions of the south central Andes, the transition from the Middle Horizon to the Late Intermediate period was accompanied by significant disruption to regional sociopolitical and economic systems, including the organization of craft...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Waka Kuboyama.

The "axe-god" jade pendants form the majority of Costa Rican jade artifacts. These pendants were valued for their "celt like shape" and did not function as real axes. Interestingly, some pendants do have abrasions on their axe edges. Because of that, it has been proposed that prior to being reworked into a corporal accessory, some of these pendants had been used as real axes or other tools. The "axe-god" pendants consist of two parts; the superior part with decoration of human or animals, and...