South America: Andes (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Jennings. Matthew Biwer. Christina Conlee.

This is an abstract from the "A New Horizon: Reassessing the Andean Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000) and Rethinking the Andean State" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The coast of southern Peru from the Nasca to Moquegua has played a pivotal role in distinct interpretation of the Wari polity. A hard imperial frontier, for example, ran through the region in 1960s models. Nasca and Moquegua were home to important administrative centers in the “mosaic of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Vazquez De Arthur.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For ancient civilizations with no form of writing, proper iconographic interpretation is an important tool for accessing the past. This is certainly true of ancient Andean civilizations, especially the Wari who produced some of the most captivating visual imagery of their time. However, Wari depictions of supernatural composite figures are so stylized that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Moore.

This is an abstract from the "Almost 100 Years since Julio C. Tello: Research at Huaca del Loro, Nasca, Peru" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Emerging evidence increasingly suggests that D-shaped structures were a tool of Wari imperial and cultural expansion throughout the Middle Horizon landscape. Analysis of their construction, geographic distribution, regional context, and specific orientations reveals that their use and purpose was not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvana Rosenfeld. Matthew Sayre.

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. The advances in food studies have revealed significant new information about life during the Middle Horizon (AD 600-1000) in the central Andes of Peru. Botanical and faunal data from Wari affiliated sites shows differential use of at least two items: molle (Schinus molle) and guinea pigs (Cavia...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Ryan Williams. John Janusek.

In this paper, we focus on the relationships between landscape places viewed as ancestors to Andean communities and things that further political agendas in imperial contexts. We explore how objects and people work together to create or deconstruct political power in Wari and Tiwanaku societies. In particular, we focus on objects, including ceremonial ceramics and lithic monuments, as examples of things that participate in building power relationships with local communities. We argue that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Veronique Belisle. Hubert Quispe-Bustamante.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nature of Wari presence in the Cusco region of southern Peru during the Middle Horizon (600-1000 CE) is debated. In this area, the Wari state built large installations at Pikillaqta and in the neighboring Huaro Valley. Excavations in the Wari colony have demonstrated the strong Wari identity of its occupants along with their political ambitions, while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Reid. Veronica Rosales Hilario. Miguel Vizcarra Zanabria. Kevin Ricci Jara.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project investigates the social mechanisms behind culture change and contact in Peru’s southern coastal valleys through the lens of road infrastructure: i.e. the built networks of communication, travel, and commerce. Here we present recent investigations of a pre-Inca road network in the Majes/Chuquibamba region of Arequipa....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosa Maria Varillas. Francesca Fernandini.

Some pre-Hispanic textiles were complex masterpieces made with labor-intensive techniques and high quality raw materials. Nevertheless, the vast majority of textiles, those used by the population at large, were plain, simple and without any decoration. This study will present a comparative analysis between a sample of plain weaves obtained from domestic contexts and a sample of high quality textiles excavated in an elaborated Wari tomb, all of them registered at the pre-Hispanic settlement of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Glowacki.

The Wari settlement of Huaro, located southeast of the Cuzco Valley in the Southern Highlands of Peru, contains a mortuary complex known as Cotocotuyoc. This towering plateau site, which overlooked the entire Huaro Wari settlement, was one of several urban components that made up a more than nine hectare Wari center, occupied for over 500 years. Excavations at Cotocotuyoc generated telling evidence for who built and occupied this settlement and how they were treated upon their deaths and in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sonia Alconini.

This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Puna Apolobamba pastures played a critical role in farming, pastoralism, and agropastoralism in the Kallawaya territory. Located to the east of the Titicaca basin, the area was dotted by sunken fields, bofedales, and water qocha reservoirs supplemented with canals. In this presentation, I discuss the nature and distribution of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Aparicio. Jose Alberto Delgado Ramos. Margarita Fernández Mier.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Terraces are the clearest evidence of landscape transformation in the highlands of the South-Central Andes of Peru; they represent a magnificent and complex solution to create cultivation areas where geographical and climatic conditions were not ideal. Water management is an important piece of this system in which the water harvested in the puna area...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alesia Hoyle. Sonia Alconini.

The qochas of the high-altitude Bolivian Apolobamba Puna region had a pivotal importance in the local agropastoral economies. Fed by snow melt and inner water sources, the qochas formed a complex hydrological system along the rich marshes. Although we do not know their origins, some of these qochas were modified during the Late Intermediate period, and a network of canals expanded in order to accommodate increasingly specialized pastoralism. Later the Inka arrival prompted specialized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abel Traslaviña.

This is an abstract from the "Lost in Transition: Social and Political Changes in the Central Southern Andes from the Late Prehispanic to the Early Colonial Periods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After the Spanish arrival in the Andes, the new social, economic, and political organization mainly materialized in two spatial entities: the "reducciones" or specially-designed towns where the Andean population was forcibly resettled, and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Herrera Wassilowsky.

This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dominated by the glaciated mountain couple Huascarán (male, 6768 m) and Tullparaju (female, 6395 m), the cultural landscape of the Callejón de Huaylas has long been shaped by stark contrasts in water availability. This paper showcases how water infiltration and surface runoff catchment technologies developed, as techné and as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Lane.

This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the past as in the present water was and is a central material element of the communities of the highland Andes. Underpinning their relationship with water and the taskways this entails has been the constant negotiation and impact of human-human and human-ecology relationships. In this regard, these populations’ relationship...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Dubois.

Research in the highlands of Huánuco, Peru, has revealed rock art sites were used to establish, negotiate, and legitimize changing social relations for more than three millennia. Implementation of stylistic seriation bolstered by art from more securely dated archaeological deposits allowed for the development of a chronological sequence of rock art styles in Huánuco. The research revealed rock art played a prominent role in expressing changing social relations in the region. This paper focuses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sadie Weber. Percy García.

This is an abstract from the "Them and Us: Transmission and Cultural Dynamism in the North of Peru between AD 250 and 950: A Vision since the Recent Northern Investigations" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the Cajamarca Valley, the site of Iscoconga (50 BCE–750 CE) represents one of the few extensively explored domestic contexts of the Cajamarca Archaeological Culture. Excavations at Iscoconga revealed, among many things, that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Ugalde. Calogero Santoro. Eugenia M. Gayo.

Surficial archaeological sites are widespread in arid environments. However, due to the difficulties in numerically dating them, they are usually considered as coarse indicators of past behaviors. Here, we explore the use of lithic weathering to develop local relative chronologies, and to better incorporate these assemblages into archaeological research. We test whether the most weathered artifacts should be considered the oldest; an assumption that has informally served to compare assemblages....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emmalee Eslinger. Sarah A. Kennedy. Karen Durand Cáceres. Alexei Vranich. Arturo Rivera Infante.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Textile production was a major economic sector in the prehispanic Tiwanaku state, for which weavers transformed camelid (llamas, alpacas) fibers and bones into utilitarian and decorative objects. As Tiwanaku pastoral communities dispersed in the wake of state collapse, they relocated to arid coastal regions where their textile industry demonstrates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hideyuki Nishizawa.

Dramatic culture change occurred in the Central Andes at the onset of the Middle Horizon (MH) (AD 500-1000). During this period, a state society emerged in the Ayacucho Valley and expanded across Peru. Even before the emergence of this state, however, culture contact of the Ayacucho heartland had already started with some remote regions in the late part of the Early Intermediate Period (EIP). This far-reaching contact would have gradually been intensified toward the beginning of the MH. Indeed,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Taylor.

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. Preliminary investigation into the use of plants at the site of Huari from the 2017 field season of the Programa Arqueológico Prehistoria Urbana de Huari resulted in new information placing the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) as a central component of the daily meal for those living in Patipampa in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica Fenton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeologists have extensively documented the importance of marine resources in the ancient Andes, and the first field season at Cerro San Isidro (Ancash, Peru) proves no different. The multi-component hilltop site lies in the agriculturally rich 'Moro Pocket' of the middle Nepeña Valley, at least an eight-hour walk from the ocean on the north-central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan Sandweiss.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dolores Piperno has been a trailblazer in interdisciplinary research, building on deep, innovative approaches to plant remains to answer a multitude of questions in archaeology and beyond. In this interdisciplinary spirit, I review research into Holocene paleoclimate along the Peruvian coast derived in the first instance from the study of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Roddick. Erik Marsh.

This is an abstract from the "A New Horizon: Reassessing the Andean Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000) and Rethinking the Andean State" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. More than 30 years ago, Garth Bawden wrote a prescient review on the "Andean State as a State of Mind." He critiqued Andean scholars for focusing on the state as an analytical unit. He complained that much good scholarship was being ruined due to the "albatross of the state," and urged...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Fullen.

Excavations at the Middle Horizon (AD 500-100) capital city of Huari in the summer of 2017 focused on understanding processes of urbanization and the resulting realities of everyday life in the domestic sector of Patipampa. Several of the architectural spaces exposed during excavation were more intensively investigated. This paper focuses on the architectural space containing niched walls in order to understand how the Wari utilized this type of space in comparison to the uses of the other...