South America (Geographic Keyword)
601-625 (1,325 Records)
The Condebamba valley, covering the southern part of the Cajamarca-Huamachuco road, constituted the privileged scenario of the interaction among local groups and foreign empires. Several surveys along this part of the Inca road have established the cultural sequence in the region and the main features of its settlements. One of these sites, Ichabamba, exhibits stone walls in a rectangular layout, with two narrow subdivisions framing a large central space. Due to its architectural features,...
Incorporation of new raw materials by hunter gatherers in Patagonia since the XVIth century. (2015)
Since the arrival of XVIth Century Europeans to Patagonia, different indigenous societies inhabiting the region were forced to deeply modify their ancient lifeways. The incorporation of new raw materials (for example glass and stoneware) in the production of traditional instruments (for example scrapers and projectile points) was one of several of modified aspects recorded both archaeologically and historically. At first glance, the use of new raw materials appears to have been equally...
The Incorporation of the Chicama Valley into the Southern Moche Polity (AD 200 – 900): A Preliminary Biodistance Assessment (2016)
Nascent state formation is often purported involved the incorporation of nonlocal peoples, this question still remains unresolved for the southern Moche (AD 200 – 900) polity thought to be centered at the Pyramids at Moche site. Some archaeologists (Castillo and Uceda 2010) that the southern Moche state's expansion began following the incorporation of the Cao Viejo polity within the Chicama Valley to the north. Further, a recently published reevaluation of radiocarbon dates for Moche ceramics...
Indigenous Anatomies (2016)
Bioarchaeological research in the Andes has shed important light on Andean lifestyles in the past. From identifying diseases such as tuberculosis and juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, to analyzing migrations, dietary patterns and interpersonal violence, bioarchaeology has demonstrated a unique capacity to evaluate certain categories of human behavior not accessible through other forms of analysis. For the purposes of interpreting the past, bioarchaeologists broadly view the body as a complex...
Indigenous Archaeology, Memory, and Ethnoarchaeology: A Multivocal Research in Collaboration with the Guarani for Land Repatriation in Brazil (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation explores my ethnoarchaeological research on a long-term interdisciplinary project in collaboration with Guarani communities toward Indigenous land repatriation in Brazil and offers a case study of a collaboration designed within the framework of Indigenous archaeological approaches. The project’s planning and fieldwork were...
Indigenous Blood: A Study of Indigeneity and Family in Northeast Brazil (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2021)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This proposal investigates people in northeastern Brazil who claim to have "indigenous blood" ("sangue de índio"), but do not classify themselves as Indigenous people. In the southeast of Piauí state (unlike other regions), no parts of the rural population claim Indigenous status or land rights, yet many people refer to their "indigenous blood." Preliminary data suggest that this refers to...
Indigenous Labor and the Hacienda System: Examining Everyday Micropolitics and Global Capitalism at the Historic Hacienda Guachalá, Ecuador (2015)
Scholarship in a variety of disciplines pertaining to global flows of people, goods and ideas have begun to emphasize the mediating effects of local communities and cultural logics on and against broader transformations and structural conditions. This topic is of particular importance to an anthropological understanding of both contemporary capitalist processes globally as well as their historical precedents. Recent theoretical approaches to contemporary capitalism, specifically, approach...
Indigenous Miners and the Making of the Andean Markets in Colonial Huancavelica (2017)
The mercury mines of Huancavelica have often been described through two familiar discourses in the colonial narrative, the European pursuit of wealth through extractive industries, and the simultaneous destruction of indigenous Andean communities through brutal forced labor and the corrosive effects of the colonial market. While these two historiographical traditions contain a great deal of truth, they can minimize the role of indigenous Andeans in the creation of new economic networks that...
Industrial Islands: Ecological Impacts of the steam-powered mills of the El Progreso plantation, Galápagos Islands. (2017)
From 1880 to 1917 "El Progreso" plantation operated on the humid highlands of San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos archipelago (Ecuador). The plantation enterprise used steam-powered machinery for sugar refining and alcohol distillation. Despite its remote location, 1000 km west from the South American coast, this large operation took advantage of the latest industrial technology. A number of specialized machines were used in sugar processing which were imported from factories in Scotland and...
Inequality and Taskscape in a Precolumbian Agricultural Landscape (2017)
Raised fields and other earthworks, as parts of archaeological landscapes, can be theorized through Ingold’s related concepts of taskscape and lines. In the Bolivian Amazon, such earthworks are the physical remains of group or community activities in the precolumbian past. As such, they are both the products of community tasks, and infrastructure, or resources that in turn afford other community tasks. In conjunction with archaeological survey and excavation, mapping of raised fields and other...
Infectious Diseases within the Tiwanaku Periphery (2015)
Today, infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, devastate millions of lives annually. The prehistoric prevalence and distribution of such infectious diseases provide context for their modern (re-)emergence, spread, and associated social perceptions, as well as inform the experiences of individuals in the past. Here I examine the expression and distribution of pathological lesions on the skeletal remains of 143 individuals from Omo M10, a Tiwanaku migrant community in Moquegua, Peru. The Middle...
Inferring the functionality of three prehistoric structures in Rio Blanco Ecuador (2015)
The Manteño culture is associated with the integration period, which is the latest pre-Columbian phase in coastal Ecuador. Much of what is known about the Manteño is their U shaped seats that were used by the elites in ceremonies; however, there is a paucity of information on the function of Manteño structures. With the support of Florida Atlantic University I conducted a survey of sixteen structures in Rio Blanco, Ecuador, of the sixteen sites I performed shovel tests on three of the sites...
Infra-structuration of Imperial Power in Ancient Ankgor and the Andes (2015)
A comparison of the agricultural reclamation projects and religious architectural programs of the Chimú, Inka, and Angkorian empires will serve to demonstrate that statecraft was an inherently technological pursuit in ancient societies. Supra-local political regimes were literally built by and through infrastructure that reconfigured different communities of practice. An important objective of the paper is to demonstrate that an analysis of the materials, temporalities, and technologies...
The Infrastructure of Community: Agricultural intensification and the development of corporate groups at Hualcayán, Peru (2015)
This paper examines how the construction of agricultural infrastructure was essential to the constitution of a new kind of community in the highland Andes after the collapse of the regional Chavín religion (500/200 BC). It presents recent excavation data from Hualcayán—a long occupied ceremonial center in Ancash, Peru—to discuss how local people reorganized their community when they abandoned a central Chavín mound and built segregated structures for agricultural production, such as terraces,...
Initial Investigations at the Multicomponent Cajamarca site of Callacpuma (2016)
Here I present the results of an initial season of fieldwork at the multicomponent Cajamarca site of Callacpuma (Qayaqpuma). Cerro Callacpuma is a large site located along the northeastern edge of the Cajamarca basin. The multicomponent site encompasses a number of architectural and other spatial zones, arrayed along the 2.5 km spine of the ridge and on its north and south slopes. Initial fieldwork focused on survey and mapping of the architectural core of the site, located along the Inca trunk...
The initial peopling of continental Aisén: New data from Cueva de la Vieja (2016)
This paper summarizes recent research conducted at Cueva de la Vieja site (BN15; 45°16’27’’ S; 71°32’24’’ W, 718 masl) in the Ñirehuao basin, Aisén, Chile, targeted at characterizing aspects of the initial peopling of Central Western Patagonia. Systematic stratigraphic excavations at this small cave yielded material evidence for human activities starting at 12,000 calibrated years BP and ever since redundant occupations at the same locale. Site formation processes are described and discussed in...
The Initial Period from the Perspective of the Casma Valley on the Northern Peruvian Coast (2016)
During the Initial Period (2100-1000 B.C.), the largest platform mound in the New World was constructed at Sechin Alto site in the Casma Valley. Measuring 300 m x 250 m x 35 m tall, this mound served as the administrative center for the Sechin Alto Polity which included over a dozen sites, most with monumental architecture. Our current understanding of the Sechin Alto Polity and how it functioned comes from decades of fieldwork by other researchers and by us, and this research is ongoing. This...
Initial Period Irrigation-based Societies in the Viru Valley, Peru (2016)
Radiocarbon dates from the sites of V-198 and Huaca El Gallo/La Gallina in the Viru Valley of Peru illustrate that the transition inland from the coast and the construction of monumental corporate architecture based on irrigation agriculture was not unique to the Supe Valle area along the Andean coastline. A second instance has been identified in Viru where it is also associated with the use of ceramics as early as 3950 years before present (2450 calibrated years B.C.). This pushes back the...
Inka Border Negotiations in the North: The Canari Case in the Province of Azuay, Ecuador (2015)
This paper will reassess relationships between the Inka and the Canari in the northern frontier zones of the Inka empire through local archaeological data. So far, scholarly knowledge about the Canari has been based upon ethnographic descriptions provided in various Spanish sources. The Canari have been characterized as a strong-willed independent people who offered fierce resistance to Inka domination. They were entrenched in the civil war between Waskhar and Atawallpa and eventually their...
Inka Craft and Ritual Production: Compositional Analysis of Ceramic Pastes and Pigments from the Temple of the Sun, Pachacamac (2016)
In Andean South America during the Late Horizon (AD 1400 - 1532), rituals and ceremonies, both inclusive and exclusive, were a major part of the Inka Empire’s strategy for control of its subjects. These ceremonies involved the use of distinct Inka-style material culture, which has its origins in Cuzco but spread throughout the Andes with the expansion of territory of the empire Tawantinsuyu. The Inka required local craft producers to replicate these imperial styles as a part of their mit’a labor...
Inka Frontier Political Economy: The Kallawayas and Yampara (2016)
In this paper I will evaluate the political economy of the ancient Inka imperial frontier in order to understand the ways in which competing border lords affiliated themselves to the empire, including associated processes of social competition, specialized production and changes in the indigenous local trajectories . In doing so, I will explore two Inka frontier segments. The first is located in the Yampara territory in the Southeastern region, and the second, in the central frontier in the...
The Inka in Chankillo ? (2016)
The Inka used numerous strategies to expand and integrate a growing empire. We present a case of Inka mobilization of things and ideas, seeking to establish context, through the lenses of stone cults, wak’as, sun worship, and sukankas, for a unique fertility offering found far from the capital on a tower at the Chankillo site (400-200 BC) on the north-central coast. The towers functioned as a solar observatory: sunrises and sunsets were tracked across the towers from two observation points. An...
The Inkas and the sacred landscape of The Shincal of Quimivil, Nortwestern Argentina. (2016)
Throughout history, societies have had a particular worldview and a sense of what’s sacred, so that in each time and space they have expressed in different ways their own awareness of an origin and a destiny. The objective of this paper is to describe and to analyze the sacred Inka landscape in one of the southernmost "New Cuzco" capital of the Kollasuyu: The Shincal of Quimivil, located in the province of Catamarca, Northwestern Argentina. The mythical stories of the Inkas tell that there was a...
Insights into the Context, Mode, and Timing of Potato Domestication through Microfossil and Ground Stone Analyses at Jiskairumoko in the Western Titicaca Basin (2015)
The data presented in this poster provide novel and direct microfossil evidence for the exploitation of potato (Solanum tuberosum) approximately 5000 years ago at Jiskairumoko, an early village site in the south-central Andes. In the Andes, elucidating the trajectory of potato domestication is central to an overall understanding of the development of agriculture, as this crop was perhaps one of the most important of the autochthonous highland Andean suite. Nevertheless, efforts to elucidate the...
Instituting Care: Reproductive Health Governance and the Ethics of Humanizing Birth in Brazil (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2015)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project set out to understand how the paradigm of 'humanized birth' is implemented in Salvador, Brazil, through Rede Cegonha, a government program to improve maternal and infant healthcare in Brazil's public health system. Over the course of twelve-months of multi-sited ethnographic research, the project followed Rede Cegonha from the federal Ministry of Health to the local health...