South America (Geographic Keyword)
1,051-1,075 (1,326 Records)
The Late Formative Period site of Jatanca is located in the southern sector of the Jequetepeque Valley, Peru. The five architecturally intricate monumental compounds that make up the core of this site housed sociopolitical, economic, and ritual activities that operated at a variety of interdependent scales. Recent excavations in 2014 within Compound I have further refined our knowledge of the relationships between the complex multiscalar activities that took place within these important spaces....
Rethinking Assemblages in the Digital Age (2017)
Archaeologists have long drawn on technological advances from other disciplines to create new ways of visualizing and classifying data. Relational databases in particular have been a cornerstone of archaeological inquiry into material assemblages, whether sets of artifacts and their attributes or constellations of sites across regions. But how have new technologies (e.g., spatial, three-dimensional, mobile, and digitally collaborative platforms) enhanced achaeologists' ability to trace, and...
Rethinking Deodoro Roca Rockshelter (Ongamira, Córdoba, Argentina). Seventy years of archaeological ideas (2015)
The hunter-gatherer archaeology of the Ongamira Valley has been a landmark in the archaeology of Argentina’s Central Region. The cultural sequence built in the 1950s is still used by many archaeologists to interpret regional peopling, subsistence, land use and mobility. However we believe it is time to review the use of rockshelter-generated data under a new approach that embraces landscape archaeology. Stable isotope-based paleo-environmental reconstructions create a baseline and permit...
Rethinking the Formative Stage: A reconsideration from two archaeological sites on the Colombian Caribbean lowlands (2017)
The concept of formative in Colombia is traditionally framed as a transitional period within the unilineal cultural evolution in the Americas, characterized for several indicators such as sedentary life, diversity of socio-economic forms and the emergence of new technologies such as pottery. In this paper, we revised two archaeological sites: Monsu and Puerto Hormiga, incorporating zooarchaeological analysis, technological and use–wear analyses to provide understanding into past human behavior...
Rethinking the Urban Microcosm in the Ancient Andes: The extended neighborhoods of the North Coast of Peru (2015)
Anthropologists have argued that early urban neighborhoods were equivalent to small villages that maintained kinship relations and economic dependencies characteristic of the rural sphere. Other scholars have noted that different urban centers (including in Mesoamerica, Angkor, and New Kingdom Egypt) were similarly configured as "sociograms" of larger territorial and ethnic boundaries. The political landscape of the North Coast of Peru offers important comparative data by which to assess the...
Revealing Pre-Columbian Bundles: Collaborative Student-Faculty Research at the Logan Museum of Anthropology, Beloit College (2016)
Recent research at the Logan Museum of Anthropology combines student and faculty expertise with archaeometric methods to reveal new information about coastal pre-Columbian Andean collections brought to the museum in the early- to mid-twentieth century. With student collaborators we scanned a possible “bird mummy” with computed tomography to reveal that there was no avian body but rather a complex suite of offerings within its cloth wrapping. They included maize cobs, shell, and other materials....
A Review of Paleodemographic Changes in Prehispanic Bolivia Using a Countrywide Assessment of Radiocarbon Dates (2018)
In this poster, I introduce a new database containing the most updated and comprehensive series of geo-referenced radiocarbon dates collected from archaeological sites located within the entire country of Bolivia. The resulting Bolivian Radiocarbon Database reviews and incorporates data from previous syntheses as well as a number of additional dates mostly available in rare publications and recent research. Using recommendations posted in previous studies, I discuss some of the potential and...
Revisiting the Archaeology of a Small Harbor: Cananéia (São Paulo, Brazil), Nineteenth–Twentieth Centuries (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Underwater and Coastal Archaeology in Latin America" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The presentation discusses the results of the author’s PhD dissertation on nineteenth- and twentieth-century harbor sites in Cananéia, São Paulo State, Brazil, a period when the capitalist economy was introduced in the region. From the mid-nineteenth century until 1950, the harbors experienced a subtle but significant transformation...
Revisiting the Chronology of Chavin de Huantar (2016)
Chavin de Huantar continues to play a central role in our understanding of the Central Andes during the Initial Period and Early Horizon and thus an understanding of it chronological position remains crucial. This talk will present a critique of the contribution of recent work at Chavin to this theme, including a consideration of both ceramic and radiocarbon sequences. A new set of radiocarbon measurements based on the analysis of animal bone from the residential sector will be presented and...
Revisiting the pre Moche - Moche transition on the El Brujo geological terrace: A spatially significant ceramic analysis (2016)
Revisiting the pre-Moche - Moche transition on the El Brujo geological terrace; A spatially significant ceramic analysis. Understanding the social relationships represented by Salinar, Gallinazo, and early Moche ceramics remains one of the important, disputed issues in archaeology on the north coast of Peru. All three ceramic styles are present in material collected during excavations of architectural nuclei around the El Brujo geologic terrace in the Chicama valley over the last 25 years. Here...
The rise and fall of the bi-headed serpent: How much of Late Lima cultural development could be explain by an ENSO? (2017)
In the present paper, I will combine evidence of two sites: The Pachacamac Sanctuary and the domestic site of Lote B, both in the Lurín valley in order to discuss the political changes happening in the central coast to the onset of the middle horizon. Asking how these political changes related with the climatic variation register for the area in both bottom sea and lake cores. I point out that this process of political centralization was contemporaneous with mayor climatic anomalies that have...
The Rise of Authority and the Decline of Warfare in the Virú Valley (2016)
The Salinar Period (400 - 200 B.C.) has long been considered a time of extensive warfare on the north coast of Peru. In the Virú Valley, fortifications and defensible settlements were common during this period, and warfare is thought to decline in the subsequent Virú Period (200 BC - AD 600). While Virú Period settlements were commonly built in open and undefensible locations, a new type of monumental fortification, the Castillo, first appeared during this time. These structures clearly served a...
Ritual and Death: A Paleopathological Analysis of Skeletal Remains from Salango, Ecuador during the Guangala Period (100 BCE-800 CE) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There are many questions that have yet to be answered about the prehistoric people of Ecuador, especially along the southern coast. In particular, more studies are needed in order to understand how people lived and interacted with each other and the landscape at the important ritual site of Salango. Salango was occupied from 4000 BCE through Spanish contact...
Ritual and Productive Activities in the Mound-Top Structure at Buen Suceso (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Three seasons of excavation at Buen Suceso have identified a series of occupation floors in the area of the site referred to as Unit 6. This area is also the highest at the site, suggesting the existence of a mound or an augmented rise that was utilized during the Valdivia period. This...
Ritual Cycles and Organizational Plasticity in the Post-collapse Colla Society of Southern Peru (A.D. 1000-1450) (2016)
As Wengrow and Graeber (2015) recently pointed out, since the 1960s anthropologists have focused on organization types—bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states and the like—that remain relatively stable over long periods of time. By contrast, this paper considers evidence from the post-collapse Colla polity of southern Peru to understand how negative perceptions of centralized authority that culminated in the collapse of the Tiwanaku state (c. A.D. 1000) both demanded, and provided the impetus for, the...
Ritual Hearth Structures at the Casma Valley Site of Huerequeque: Making a Case for Highland/Coastal Interaction in Initial Period (2100-1000 BCE) Peru (2015)
Recent excavations at the site of Huerequeque, some 24 km inland at an altitude of 450 m, exposed several large and elaborate hearths, including three ventilated examples. While hearths for cooking and warmth are very common within residential architecture at Huerequeque, these special hearths are consistently associated with non-domestic architecture. One example occupies the center of an intermediate-sized mound structure adjacent to the main platform mound at the site where it served as a...
Ritual Practices and the Negotiation of Wari-Tiwanaku Relations at Cerro Baúl (2016)
The presence of both Wari and Tiwanaku colonies in the Moquegua Valley (southern Peru) offers a unique opportunity to study the colonial strategies of these empires and their interactions during the first millennium AD. Here, we more specifically explore the role of ritual practices in mediating relations between the Wari and Tiwanaku empires. We focus on a Titicaca basin inspired platform and court complex located outside of the main Wari administrative sector of the site of Cerro Baúl,...
Ritual violence or simply ritual? Evaluating the evidence for child sacrifice in Late Formative Period Peru (2017)
Highland mortuary practices during the Andean Late Formative Period (900–500 BC) in Ancash, Peru are poorly understood, in part because burials from this period are rarely encountered. Excavations conducted in 2009 at the archaeological site of Hualcayán uncovered a primary interment of a juvenile aged 5-6 years at time of death, dated in the range 806–540 calBC. The individual was buried with a necklace strung with bone and shell beads and bone spoons. Bioarchaeological analyses indicate the...
Ritualistic Nature of Juvenile Interments, Cosma Archaeological Complex, Ancash, Perú (2016)
Research exploring mortuary treatments, morbidity, and trauma among juveniles has largely been left out of bioarchaeological discussions due to the difficulties subadult skeletal remains present to archaeological investigations. Despite these limitations, analysis of juvenile burials and skeletal remains has the potential to improve our understanding of the physical and social lives of children in the past. Excavations conducted by Proyecto Investigación Arqueológico Distrito del Cáceres Ancash...
The River of the Amazons: Its Discovery and Early Exploration, 1500-1743 (1965)
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Road Networks of Southern Peru: Connecting Landscapes of Colonialism (2016)
Increasingly relevant to studies of geopolitical state expansion is the role of infrastructure: the networks of communication, travel, and commerce that embed local human landscapes within broader processes of imperialism. In pre-industrial communities, formal roads and highways were often the only localized presence of an overarching state, promising greater interconnectivity and shaping the colonial experience. I utilize geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing applications to...
Rock Art and Prehistoric Roads: The Connection in Southern Peru (2015)
The site Toro Muerto, located in the Majes Valley of southern Peru, constitutes one of the largest and better studied rock art sites in South America. Approaching Toro Muerto through a ‘landscapes perspective,’ we can situate the site within a changing ideological, socio-economic, and political landscape beginning in the Middle Horizon (A.D. 600-1000) to the 18th century Colonial-period. This paper goes beyond the typical site-level analysis to place Toro Muerto at the center of a southern...
Rock art in the construction of social space in the Parguaza River, Venezuela (2016)
The rock paintings of the Parguaza River form part of a tradition that extends back thousands of years. We can only speculate on why the paintings were made, who made them, or what their original meaning may have been. However, rock art provides an excellent index of the symbolic world of the peoples who settled the area, as manifested in different traditions. Local belief systems refer to ancestral territorial ties, and the mythical and ritual significance of mountains, caves, and rock art...
Rock Salt Mining in San Pedro de Atacama, Northern Chile, during the 20th Century: Protoindustrialization or Industrialization in the Periphery? (2015)
Rock salt exploitation in the oases of San Pedro de Atacama is one among many expressions of capitalist expansion in Latin America. Except for mining concessions, historical documentation of these practices is virtually nonexistent, although material remains and former actors in the mining process still survive. In this paper, we present archaeological evidence of rock salt mining sites of different scale and kind of exploitation that coexist throughout the 20th century. Such differences show...
The Rock-Art of Central-West Brazil: New Studies from Chapada dos Guimarães / MT (2018)
A new project carried out in the region of the Rio Vermelho / São Lourenço river basin in the central-western region of Brazil started in 2016. This project focus on the studies of the initial stages of the establishment of the hunters gathers groups in this region. It is intended through excavations, surveys and research in rock art to show patterns of the peoples who inhabited that region. The first systematic field surveys within this project, entitled "Archeology in the Pantanal region"...