South America (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Johnson. Jason Nesbitt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite decades of archaeological research, the economic and social ties connecting the eastern Andes and Upper Amazon remain underexplored. Stylistic and compositional comparison of ceramics from the sites of Canchas Uckro (ca. 1100-850 BCE), a large monumental platform situated above the Puccha River, and the Cave of the Owls, on the Monzón River near...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Smith. Patrick Mullins. Steve Wernke. Brian Billman.

Site-based archaeological projects often face a common challenge of producing detailed maps of large, complex areas. The use of traditional site-mapping techniques (e.g. total station) can be expensive and labor-intensive. Alternatively, a variety of platforms provide archaeologists with practical and inexpensive approaches to aerial photography and photogrammetric mapping. Here, the authors explore three different approaches to aerial photography as alternatives to traditional methods of site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcela Poirier. Kevin Vaughn.

In this paper we address the results of an Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) on a sample of sherds from Santa Luisa and Higosñoc, two Las Trancas Valley sites from the Southern Nasca Region (SNR), Perú. By sampling sherds dating from the Early to the Late Horizon, this study adds temporal depth to previous compositional work in the region. While results confirm previous analysis conducted in the SNR suggesting compositional uniformity during Early Nasca, results also reveal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Go Matsumoto.

This paper discusses the results of a recent compositional analysis by INAA of 225 samples of ceramics sherds excavated from the Great Plaza of Huacas de Sicán. The analysis revealed a limited number (3) of compositional groups and a high rate of arsenic and uranium in one group. The author argues that the high rate of arsenic indicates the side-by-side production of arsenical copper and ceramic vessels and that the vessels used at the Great Plaza were produced at the regional ceramic workshop...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emlen Myers. Hector Neff. Mike Glasscock.

Ceramics from three archaeological areas in the dry lowlands of eastern Bolivia were analyzed by instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA). The resulting compositional data were analyzed statistically to identify potential patterns of manufacture and distribution. Samples were selected from three archaeological areas investigated prior to construction of the Bolivia-Brazil Natural Gas Pipeline in 1997-1998: 1) Rio Grande; 2) Bañados del Izozog; and 3) an inter-riverine area in the Gran...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phil C. Riris.

Archaeologists have long sought to explain the distribution of rock art traditions across Amazonia and circum-Amazonia with reference to stylistic variability in the iconography, often as a proxy for exploring shared concepts of symbolic representation, mediated through local cultural norms. Where it has been possible, cross-referencing this kind of data with the ethnographic and archaeological records has engendered valuable new interpretations of indigenous symbolic repertoires in a variety of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Stanish.

The Pampa de Carmen above the Chincha valley contains a series of Paracas period archaeological features including geoglyphs, ceremonial mounds, settlements and small stone structures. I discuss how these features integrate the pampa into a monumental ritual landscape focused on five major settlements. I interpret these features to be a means to attract people from outside the region to periodic market fairs held in the neutral chaupiyungas areas between highlands and coast. These fairs...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Zeidler.

This paper revisits interpretations of the built environment at the Early Formative Valdivia town site of Real Alto in coastal Guayas province, Ecuador, from the broader comparative perspective of contemporary Formative Period sites throughout the Americas. Special emphasis is placed on the Middle Valdivia town configuration encompassing individual households, residential neighborhoods, open plazas, and central ceremonial space, but consideration is also given to Late Valdivia transformations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evelyn R. Nimmo.

One of the major challenges in working with museum collections of excavated material is the paucity of information available about the original excavation. What value do these collections have without any context? This paper examines a case study of an archaeological collection from one of the first Spanish Jesuit missions founded in Southern Brazil, housed at the Paranaense Museum, Curitiba, Brazil. The mission, Santo Inacio Mini (1610 – 1631), was the largest in the province and was integral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan Weaver.

The fertile desert middle-valleys of South Coastal Peru’s Grande Basin offered resources for great productive potential which supported a large population since the Formative Period and attracted intense agro-industrial interests during Spanish colonization. Historical archaeology offers tools for understanding regional processes of population replacement, highland/coastal exchange and migration, and the radical transformation of social processes during the last five centuries of intense...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruna Rocha. Vinicius Oliveira.

The first millennium AD saw an increase in population density throughout much of Amazonia; this is testified by an increase in the number and size of coeval archaeological sites, many of which include anthropogenic dark earths, widely considered as proxies for intensive and continuous human habitation and alteration of the environment. The Terra Preta do Mangabal and Sawre Muybu sites were village settlements occupied from c.700AD and c.900AD respectively, located along the rapids of the upper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucia Clarisa Watson. Krzysztof Makowski. Jessica Christie.

We will discuss the characteristics and scope of Inca politics in the Lurin Valley by focusing on the results of excavations carried out by Makowski (2016) in Pachacamac with its famous Imperial Inca temple and oracle, as well as in the administrative center Pueblo Viejo – Pucara. The comparison of landscape transformed by Imperial infrastructure between the Highlands of Cuzco (Christie 2016) and the lower Lurin Valley allows to reconstruct the mechanisms through which social memory was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Mamani. Jesus Mamani.

Una de las más grandes reformas llevadas a cabo durante el Virreinato en el Perú fue la Reducción General de Indios, que consistió en el traslado y reubicación de las poblaciones indígenas. Este proceso de cambios no solo se enfocó en la generación de una nueva forma de asentamientos humanos, sino que también afectaron con toda una estructura social, que a su vez repercutió en el modo de vida y bagaje cultural materializado en la distribución, uso y representación de espacios, es este el caso de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gustavo Barrientos. Juan Belardi. Luciana Catella. Flavia Carballo. Fernando Oliva.

The aim of this presentation is to introduce and discuss an approach to sourcing chert materials based on the use of spatial continuous models of relative frequency data (i.e. percentage representation of toolstone classes in georeferenced artifact assemblages), which is particularly useful in areas where there is scarce information about both the variability of one or many toolstone classes represented in lithic assemblages across the regional space and the localization of their likely or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christophe Delaere.

El lago Titicaca se encuentra en el corazón del paisaje cultural Tiwanaku. Las excavaciones subacuáticas realizadas en 2014 a lo largo del espacio litoral de la Isla del Sol (Puncu) sitúan al lago como nexo de comunicación y de intercambio de toda la cuenca lacustre. En el plano ritual, este mar interior formaba parte de la vida cotidiana y como tal ha jugado un papel preponderante en la relación que mantenía el hombre con el territorio en el que vivía; racionalizándolo para comprenderlo,...

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 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 Karen Stothert.

Personal and professional reminiscences from 1979 to the present of the life and works of Dolores Piperno, great person, smart graduate student and distinguished scientist whose contribution to the early history of Ecuador (culture Las Vegas) has been transforatioal. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea López. Florencio Delgado Espinoza.

Carvajal´s descriptions of the Upper Amazonian populations created controversies, given that little evidence was presented until recently, by the archaeologists about the demography of the area. Only few studies in the Upper Amazonia region have contributed with data for the reconstruction of local demography, given that most of the work has been enforced as contract archeology projects within the oil and mining industry, with specific questions on mine and lack of regional scope. In the Valle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles W. Mead.

This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scotti Norman.

In the first generation after the Spanish conquest of Peru, indigenous Andeans and Spaniards entered into a period of change in which daily practices, traditions, and religion were negotiated and reshaped. A local response to Spanish attempts at Christian conversion was the cultural revitalization movement of Taki Onqoy (Quechua-dancing sickness). Primary sources suggest that this movement was practiced by local Andeans and manifested through the rejection of Spanish religious beliefs in favor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Caro. Maria Pereda. Ivan Briz. Myrian Álvarez. Debora Zurro.

Cooperation studies have become an essential area of knowledge across different disciplines. Within the humanities and the social sciences, it has been used to explain human behaviour as well as the maintenance of the social tissue itself. It has also given clues to explain the variability and the plasticity of human social organization at different levels. In this presentation we focus on Yamana society a nomadic hunter-fisherer-gatherer group that inhabited the southernmost region of South...

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 Diego Salazar. Andres Troncoso. Frances Hayashida. Cesar Parcero-Oubiña.

The hyperarid and thinly populated Atacama area of northern Chile seems an unlikely target of imperial interest. However, archaeological research has demonstrated direct control over this territory and its people by the Inka, who were drawn to the region by rich copper deposits that have been exploited at least since the Late Archaic (4500 BP). How did the Inka reorganize copper mining technology and labor? How were mining and metallurgical centers provisioned in this agriculturally marginal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monika I. Therrien.

The Spanish settlement of Santafe de Bogota is examined from a basic standpoint, that of the concept of corography introduced by the Spanish Monarchy as a means to gain control of the ever expanding Empire. Corography became the instrument through which Spaniards came to recognize the new environment and the people that inhabited it, but always from their own point of view. In this ongoing project, the concept is reintroduced through the analysis of material culture evidences (geological,...