South America (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Sandweiss.

The coastal Atacama Desert in southern Peru has some of the oldest and best documented fishing sites in western South America, including Terminal Pleistocene through Early Holocene components at Quebrada Jaguay and Quebrada Tacahuay and Early to Middle Holocene components at the Ring Site and Quebrada de los Burros. These sites have offered insight into the antiquity and variability of the early fishing tradition, the antiquity and features of coast-highland interaction, and coastal settlement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Helmer.

This paper examines the relationship between foodways and settlement nucleation at Samanco, a maritime center located in the Nepeña Valley littoral. Samanco comprises hundreds of orthogonal stone structures agglutinated into compounds spanning over 40 hectares. The site is similar to several other contemporary settlements in Nepeña, interpreted to be part of an integrated peer network. Excavations at Samanco yielded extraordinary amounts of food refuse, including mollusk, fish, faunal, and plant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Young.

This presentation will put forward the preliminary results of the first season of the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica Atalla. The project represents a first step in clarifying the role of the Early Horizon period site of Atalla, located in the district of Yauli, region of Huancavelica, in the south-central highlands of Peru. Atalla is of particular archaeological interest as the earliest recorded monumental ceremonial site in the region of Huancavelica. The site is also distinguished by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Treloar. David Chicoine.

Results of systematic surface surveys and excavations at Early Horizon sites in the lower Nepeña Valley indicate the increased importance of armed conflicts and intercommunity violence, especially during the second half of the first millennium BC. Although scholars agree that warfare likely played a major role in shaping local sociopolitical and ritual landscapes during the Early Horizon, little is known about the nature of warfare and associated defensive strategies in Nepeña. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindi Masur. Jean-Francois Millaire.

Previous research on plant foods and social memory in the Andes has primarily focused on ritual feasting amongst elite segments of society within the confines of exclusionary monumental spaces. However, it is vital to look beyond elite-directed activities and consider ritualized commoner and quotidian practices as integral to community building and memory making. This paper will demonstrate how domestic food production and consumption, the construction of agricultural landscapes, and wild plant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Conlee.

Presently evidence for the earliest domesticated maize in the Central Andes comes from the north coast of Peru. Dating to the Middle Preceramic this early maize consists of Proto-Confite Morocho and Confite Chavinense, which were primitive types of popcorn. In contrast, little is known about the early use of maize on the south coast. A cob of Confite Chavinense was found in a Preceramic context at the site of La Tiza in southern Nasca. Surrounding contexts, including a hearth, date the context...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ales Hrdlicka.

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 Joel W. Grossman. Timothy C. Kenna.

This presentation will discuss the results of processing eight high-resolution Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon determinations on charcoal found in association with poorly dated ceramics and copper-alloy artifacts recovered from an important pre-Inca site, Waywaka, in the south-central highlands of Andahuaylas, Apurimac, Peru. Excavations at Waywaka revealed a naturally stratified series of deposits of Pre-Inca cultures spanning nearly four millennia. In the bottom-most layers was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dudley T. Easby, Jr..

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 Daniela Osorio. Calogero Santoro. Marcela Sepúlveda. José Capriles. Paula Ugalde.

The problem of how and when the Andean highland (≥ 3,400 m above sea level) west of the Atacama Desert was colonized by humans has recently been the subject of extensive interdisciplinary research. New information challenges traditional interpretations that occupation of this extreme environment started relatively late in the process of peopling South America. Based on archaeological and paleoecological data from various sites in northern Chile, we propose that the Altiplano, a mega-ecological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rafael Suárez.

Research on the early occupation in the Southern Cone has turned its attention to a particular type of diagnostic artifact: the Fishtail points. Archaeological excavations conducted in Uruguay over the last 15 years have allowed indicating the presence of a cultural tradition of bifacial stemmed points, represented by at least three distinct cultural groups defined on the basis of different projectile points types: Fishtail (12,800- 12,200 calibrated yr BP), Tigre (12,000-11,200 calibrated yr...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom D. Dillehay.

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 Julian Salazar. Jordi A. López Lillo.

Agriculture was adopted by NW Argentina inhabitants around BP 3500 within a complex process of macroregional population reorganization, economic intensification and increase of territoriality. This transition was followed by a rapid introduction of large and solid buildings that became the major and most visible features in the village outlays after BP 2500. Thousands of multi round-room compounds were built and inhabited by several generations all over several high valleys, like Tafí, Anfama,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Janusek.

A specific range of human subjects, or fully socialized, moral persons- rigorously categorized according to age, sex, kinship, and so forth -are, of course, the most critical ‘things’ that any society seeks to produce. I investigate the production of prehispanic human subjects in the Lake Titicaca Basin of the South American Andes. To understand the emergence of the Middle Horizon center of Tiwanaku at around AD 500, I investigate the deployment of innovative spatial, material, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Hundman. Nicola Sharratt. Beth Turner.

Subsistence practices during the transition from Early Intermediate Period (200 BC-AD 600) to the Middle Horizon Period (AD 600- AD 1000) is crucial to understanding Pre-Hispanic life on the Southern coast of Peru. As the Nasca polity waned and the Wari state began to expand life in the coastal valleys was changing. Through bioarchaeological reconstruction of diet and health at the site of Cerro Del Oro, in the Canete Valley, the effects of demographic and subsistence changes can be examined....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark N. Cohen.

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 Delphine Renard. Anne Zangerle. Doyle McKey.

Some South American lowland environments bear impressive legacies of pre-Columbian agriculture: vestiges of raised fields that have persisted since their abandonment centuries or millennia ago. In an interdisciplinary approach, we aim at understanding how the construction and use of raised fields in the past influence the functioning of these ecosystems today. In a raised-field landscape in a seasonally flooded coastal savanna of French Guiana, we characterized the distribution of soil...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camille Weinberg. Nicole Payntar. R. Alan Covey.

Regional surveys to the north and west of Cusco demonstrate that the earliest villages (c. 1000 BC – AD 300) are found across a wide elevation range, and in varying contexts of local ecological diversity. This paper considers the role that local resource variation and subsistence practices might have played in the long-term stability of these early communities. Using data from 131 Formative Period sites registered across a 1200 square kilometer study region, we evaluate the surrounding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Chyla.

Huarmey valley, at the southern fringe of Peruvian North Coast, was inhabited for millennia. It is a rich, multi-cultural area, where almost all types of archaeological sites are represented. The discovery of an imperial mausoleum at El Castillo in 2012/13 is an example how little we know about this region. During the previous seasons modern state-of-art techniques of documentation were used on daily basis at the time of excavations. The successful attempts to implement new non-invasive, remote...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Pink. Danielle Kurin. Matthew Boulanger.

The Chanka were an ethnically distinct population that occupied territory in modern-day Apurimac, Peru. During the Middle Horizon (MH) (600-1000 AD) Chanka sites considered in this study were situated along roads connecting three major administrative centers of the Wari Empire: Huari, Pikillacta, and Jincamocco. After the imperial collapse during the Late Intermediate Period (LIP) (1000-1476 AD), evidence of increased violence suggests a shift in regional social organization. This study utilized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Bergmann. Robert Tykot. Robert Bowers.

Peru is commonly known for having the largest empire in pre-Columbian America but relatively less is known about the subsistence and migratory patterns of the pre-Inca communities that existed from the Initial Period through the Early Intermediate Period. During the Initial Period, interaction and trade was prevalent among coastal, inland, and highland populations with trade interactions intensifying later in time with peoples from the highlands. Our research tests the hypothesis that increased...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Berquist. Erick Casanova. Abigail Gamble. Samantha Seyler. Steven Wernke.

The archaeology of Spanish colonialism in the Andean region is coming into increasing focus with the documentation of Spanish colonial doctrinas and reducciónes, along with the excavation of religious structures, public spaces, and elite and common indigenous households. However, we still lack a clear comparative diachronic perspective of how Spanish colonialism affected the daily lives and values of indigenous Andean peoples. This paper presents the results of the 2016 excavations of three...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Barcelo. Florencia Del Castillo Bernal.

In this contribution we present the results of a computer simulation of an "artificial society", implemented to understand how cultural identities and cultural standardization may have emerged in a prehistoric hunter-gatherer society as a consequence of restricted cooperation. The aim of the model is to explain how diversity and self-identification may have emerged in the small-scale societies of our prehistoric past. The computer model explores some possible consequences of theoretical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Alan Covey. Miriam Aráoz Silva.

Located in the Andean highlands of northern Peru, the Inca administrative center at Huánuco Pampa served as a provincial capital, drawing thousands of tributary households into scripted encounters with imperial officials on festive occasions. Inca site planning created spaces for performing diverse identities and reinforcing relationships between local people and Inca elites. After an unsuccessful Spanish attempt to establish a town within the central plaza of the site, Huánuco Pampa faded to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Chicoine.

This paper considers the spatial design of ritual gathering places and the iconographic content of associated sculpted friezes at Early Horizon centers in Nepeña, coastal Ancash, Peru. The Early Horizon marked a transition from representational art of the late Initial Period to abstract forms of public visual arts during the second half of the first millennium BC. This paper examines the context of the public visual arts within enclosed compounds – hypothesized as multi-functional residences –...