South America (Geographic Keyword)
1,101-1,125 (1,346 Records)
Archaeological investigations conducted at the site of Ingatambo highlight the Inka imperial policy in the provinces, which relied on the use of local ethnic groups in the state bureaucracy. Colonial documentation noted the movement of coastal communities within the Inka Empire to the Cajamarca region in order to serve in the tambos. Pottery sherds from the Ingatambo site illustrate that the coastal communities charged with administrating this site continued to produce pottery following the...
The Role of the Toad in the Middle Horizon Andes: A Chemical and Iconographic Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Seeing Wari through the Lens of the Everyday: Results from the Patipampa Sector of Huari" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Here we present preliminary findings of chemical analyses performed on a Middle Horizon pottery sherd (c. 600-1100 AD). The sherd originates from the capital region of the Wari and has the striking iconographic representation of either a frog or a toad with visual indications of preserved residues....
The Role of Women Following a Community Archaeology Project in Agua Blanca, Ecuador (1979-2018) (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. The Agua Blanca community has participated in one of the most successful and sustainable community archaeology projects in Ecuador. Since the start of excavations in the Manabí region in 1979, archaeologist Collin McEwan and Maria-Isabel Silva have worked collaboratively with community members to excavate, interpret, and present findings about the...
Rooms, Compounds, Alley Dumps, and Neighborhoods: Intrasite Zooarchaeology on Peru’s North Coast (2017)
The increasing number of samples of zooarchaeological remains from the prehistoric Chimu settlement of Cerro La Virgen, on the North Coast of Peru, allow a comparison of consumption and discard patterns within and between households and neighborhoods. The information from this analysis adds to our understanding of economic and political realities of life in a community which would have to balance the demands of family consumption and the state tributes requested by the Chimu polity. Of special...
Root, Fruit and Dirt: using ethnoarchaeology and archaebotany for constructing reference collections of plants in activity areas in Eastern Amazon (2016)
In the Brazilian State of Pará, Eastern Amazon, indigenous Asurini populations living in the middle course of the Xingú River currently face the challenge of maintaining traditional lifeways in a situation of great ecological and social change, due to the construction of Belo Monte, one of the world’s largest hydroelectric dams. Amongst their practices, the cultivation of diverse varieties of manihot, sweet-potato, beans, maize and other crops is an important aspect of Asurini culture, and one...
Rules for Fishy Trash? (2016)
Analysis of intrasite spatial variation can improve our understanding of the dynamics of daily living of past populations. Fish remains are a special type of trash with distinctive aspects of capture, transport, preparation, and discard when compared to other fauna. This paper focuses on the analysis of fish remains from the Chimu site of Cerro La Virgen (A.D. 1000-1470) on the north coast of Peru. Cerro La Virgen is a rural town of mixed economy, including both fishing and agriculture, linked...
Rural Life during and after the Fall of the Wari Empire: A Stable Isotope Analysis of Childhood Diet and Geographical Origins at the Village of Qasa Pampa, Ayacucho, Peru (2017)
Life in a rural village can be vastly different from life in the metropolis, and when an empire collapses the effects can reach even the smallest village. For Qasa Pampa, an agricultural village that was occupied in Wari (ca. 650 – 850 CE) and post-Wari (ca. 1000 – 1200 CE) times and located several kilometers away from the capital of Huari, life for its population may have been quite distinct from their capital counterparts. Stable carbon and oxygen isotope analysis can shed light on the...
Sacred Spaces and Ideology in the Pambamarca Fortress Complex (2016)
In the northern Andes of Ecuador just north of Quito lies the Pambamarca Fortress Complex. This region was one of the last to fall to the Inca in the late 1490's/1500's as they expanded their empire, and they met great resistance from the indigenous societies of Northern Ecuador. Fighting occurred for over a decade and power strategies changed to conquer this region. These struggles are apparent, best seen through the high number of Inca fortifications and enclosures throughout the landscape....
Sacrifice and Social Identity: Untangling Identity from a Mass Burial at Matrix 101, Huaca Las Ventanas, Peru (2015)
Typically, burials are laden with symbols of social identity such as age, sex, and wealth of grave goods. However, conceptualizing individual or group identity can become problematic when examining non-modal or deviant burials. During the 2011-2013 field seasons, the National Sicán Museum and the Lambayeque Valley Biohistory Project recovered over 200 individuals from a Late Middle Sicán (A.D 1050 - 1100) sacrificial context designated Matrix 101. Constructed in three separate phases during a...
Sacrifice Reconsidered: Interpreting Stress from Archaeological Hair at Huaca de los Sacrificios (2017)
The Inka Empire (AD 1450-1532) practiced flexible forms of statecraft that affected their periphery populations across the cordillera. Lived experiences of different Inka subjects differed in varied ways, which therefore requires nuanced bioarchaeological approaches. This study aims to interpret psychosocial stress through assays of cortisol in archaeological hair from sacrificed individuals (n=19) recovered in the Huaca de los Sacrificios at the Chotuna-Chornancap Archaeological complex. This...
Sacrificial Landscapes and the Anatomy of Moche Biopolitics (2016)
Power in Moche society was fundamentally biopolitical, expressed through the violent deconstruction and reconstruction of bodies, including animate places. An examination of Moche architecture reveals that North Coast populations envisioned built environments as living organisms that were biologically dependent on human communities. The erection and renovation of Moche ceremonial architecture played an instrumental role in the generation of life and the harnessing of vital forces. Therefore,...
San Catequilla de Pichincha and Catequil, the cult to Lightning (Illapa) in the context of Inca expansion (2015)
Natural features, hills, subterranean springs, etc., designated as, ‘Catequilla,’ in northern Ecuador were huacas associated with Catequil, a religious cult to lightning (Illapa), worshiped from Quito to Cuzco, in the context of Inca expansion. San Catequilla de Pichincha is located in the Pomasqui Valley of northern highland Ecuador and the only huaca under the equator at 0°0’02" South Latitude. Ethnohistoric accounts indicate it was one of the most highly venerated Andean huacas, in part...
Sancti Spiritus (1526-1529), an Ephemeral but Diagnostic Spanish Fort (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Colonial Forts in Comparative, Global, and Contemporary Perspective", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The arrival of the first European settlers in the Southern Cone of America was followed by a settlement policy with marked military characteristics. The forts located along the waterways were the strategic enclaves from which the conquest of the La Plata Basin was developed. These forts were also the...
Santa Maria de la Antigua del Darién: The Aftermath of Colonial Settlement (2017)
What kind of relationships were created between the indigenous people of the western region of the Gulf of Urabá (Colombia) and the Spaniards in the early years of the conquista? What happened in Santa Maria de la Antigua del Darién (1510-1524), the first European city founded on the American mainland, in the course of its short history, and immediately after its abandonment? We have a number of clues that can be drawn from contemporary historical sources (Oviedo), sources immediately following...
Satellite Remote Sensing of Archaeological Environmental Change in the Chicama Valley (2017)
As global ecological change becomes a pressing contemporary issue, it’s beneficial to also consider how long term land use histories have effected current ecologies. Using imagery from several multispectral remote sensing satellites and field verification of detected sites, I describe how legacies from archaeological occupations impact modern industrial sugarcane production in the Chicama valley. Occupation sites and agricultural systems, both extant and remnant, continue to influence sugarcane...
Satisfying needs and negotiating freedom in colonial Spanish American cities (2017)
Unlike archaeological studies that seek to focus on the relations of power and elites, that by means of physical violence and symbolic exerted their domination over other groups assumed to be passive, an approach from practice theories and spaces of contact in which daily practices took place is proposed. It is in these spaces and through everyday activities that curiosity, knowledge and consent made it possible for the majority to survive under the colonial regime, without this implying an...
Scales and visibility of human-environment interactions in western Amazonia: the case of the geoglyph builders (2015)
A debate that has received much attention in recent years is the nature and scale of pre-Columbian impact in the Amazon lowlands. While the notion that Amazonia is a "pristine wilderness" has long been rejected, several papers have proposed that human impact in western regions was more sporadic and on a smaller scale than impacts in central and eastern regions, and that western Amazonia supported sparse pre-Columbian populations. The discovery of over 400 geometrically-patterned earthworks in...
Scaling the Huaca: Constructing Late Moche Identity through Architectonic Re-presentation of Place at Huaca Colorada, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru (2015)
Following Descola’s "modes of identification", Andean ontology has recently been suggested to represent a combination of animism and analogism that establishes strong intersubjective relationships wherein humans, objects and places are intrinsically linked while simultaneously creating a highly hierarchical scale based on the properties of each autonomous entity. In order to operationalize this animistic-analogical ontology, mimetic processes of imitation and transformation serve to link and...
Sealing Ritual Spaces of a Formative Site by the Early Cajamarca Culture (2016)
Pacopampa is one of the largest ceremonial centers in the Formative Period located at the north highlands of Peru. Almost all the ritual space was destroyed after the Formative Period, however, the square sunken court was reused by the people belonging to the Early Cajamarca Period. Some platforms and rooms were constructed at the center of the court and a series of ritual activities associated with a lot of miniature pottery could be observed. After that unusual activities the court was orderly...
The Search for Places in Southwestern Archaeology: Ancient Landscape Building in the Madeira and Purus Basins and Long-Term Indigenous History (2016)
Mounds, ditches, roads and other kinds of earthworks are found in ever larger quantities in southwestern amazon archaeology. An increase in the quantity and quality of research carried out in this area and the more detailed data that was recently made available have changed our understanding of the kind and degree of human interaction with the environment. Today, archaeological landscape building in this region can be explored in a more regionally detailed framework, since the knowledge produced...
Searching for Nora (WGF - Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship) (2023)
This resource is an application for a Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Nora de Izcue turned to filmmaking to support herself and her four children after escaping a troubled marriage in the 1960s. She ended up becoming a social justice documentarian at a time of repression and revolution, forging the way as Peru's first woman film director and changing the future of Latin American cinema through the Foundation for New Latin American Cinema and the International...
A Second Room of the Posts? Ceremonialism at La Marcha during Late Nasca and the Middle Horizon (2015)
Preliminary investigations of the La Marcha site have revealed a key residential, mortuary, and ceremonial locale in the Las Trancas Valley. While initial use of the site occurred during the late Formative, here we report on the considerable Late Nasca and Middle Horizon occupation. In addition to residential zones, we documented large plazas with huarango post features similar to those at Estaquería and Cahuachi. These include complexes of up to 9 posts, oriented in rectilinear clusters along...
Second-Hand Spaces: abandonment and reoccupation during the final stages of a Tiwanaku provincial temple (Omo M10A) (2015)
The Tiwanaku colonies in Moquegua, Peru represent some of the best preserved archaeological remains left by this south central Andean polity. This has led to a detailed understanding of daily life and ceremonial practices of these Tiwanaku colonists. However, our understanding of how these lifestyles and practices were transformed during and after the disintegration the highland core is still relatively limited. This paper will take a site-specific approach to explore this enigmatic period of...
The Secret Life of Cacao in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon (2017)
Genetic studies suggest that cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) domestication occurred in the Upper Amazon of southeastern Ecuador and northeastern Peru and was then transported by humans northwards to Central America and Mexico. As such, we should expect to find the earliest archaeological evidence of cacao use in the tropical forests of South America. This paper presents starch granule evidence for the early use of cacao from the Upper Amazon site of Santa Ana-La Florida during the Ecuadorian Early...
Sedentism and plant domestication: North west Amazonia (2017)
Two different scenarios have been proposed to explain sedentarization and the transition from foraging to sedentary societies. In the first a key resource or a combination of resources allows the stability of the population giving rise, over time, to sedentarization; in the second, a population concentration caused by an external change such as drastic climatic fluctuation or regional population increase with its concomitant social problems force the adoption of a sedentary way of life. In these...