South America: Andes (Geographic Keyword)
801-825 (1,096 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a temporally bounded bio-social process, puberty offers a compelling topic to explore the lived experiences of past people. The onset and pace of pubertal development are shaped by nutritional, environmental, and social factors that reflect long and short-term childhood experiences. We investigate puberty as a flexible process shaped by multiple...
Pulling Abundance out of Thin Air: The Role of Pastoralism in 1000 BC Peru (2018)
Andean camelid pastoralism – with its origins in the puna of the South-Central Andes – plays a key role in risk management and transformation of low-energy, high-abundance resources. Camelids not only help pastoralists mitigate risk by acting as literal "wealth on the hoof," but they also maintain cohesion of intergroup relationships across vast distances by facilitating mobility within and among diverse environmental zones. Here, I examine intensified camelid pastoral systems as an adaptation...
The Puruwá Border: Archaeological Footprints and Ancestorship in Tungurahua and Chimborazo, Ecuador (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Barbacoan World: Recognizing and Preserving the Unique Indigenous Cultural Developments of the Northern Andes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Who are the descendants of the ancient Puruwá? Archaeological settlements located in the central highlands of Ecuador, share certain features which researchers used to interpret as the materiality of ethnohistoric Puruwá. Human figures and heads manufactured in ceramics with...
Puruwá Polity under Inka Rule in Colta, Chimborazo Province (Ecuador) (2018)
The Inka incorporated the territory of today's Ecuador to the Tawantinsuyu around 1420. This conquest is well documented from South to North by recording the expansion of monumental features such as pukaras, tambos, bridges, terraces, collkas, wakas, patios and plazas, built in traditional Inka style. The political transformation of northern Andes landscape by the Inka was very profound in the Loja and Azuay provinces of southern Ecuador. While it was a milder transformative factor around Quito...
Putting Heads Together: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Museum Archaeology of the National Tsantsa Collection at the Pumapungo Museum, Cuenca (2018)
There are many collections of Tsantsas around the world. These shrunken heads were created by the Shuar and Achuar peoples of the Ecuadorian and Peruvian amazon until the mid-20th century. Though most of these museum collections have a known provenience, the individual histories and the authenticity of some of the heads has been contested. Similar questions have risen for Tsantsas held at the Pumapungo Ethnographic museum in the city of Cuenca, Ecuador. Using the approach of museum...
pXRF in the Colca Valley: Experimenting with a Nondestructive Chemical Discrimination of Ceramic Fragments (2018)
The choice of clay and pigment sources for ceramic production in the Andes has the potential to convey complex information about the resilience and persistence of Inca social structure in the Colca Valley throughout the imposition of Spanish imperialism. Prior to the Spanish invasion, ceramics in the Colca Valley were likely primarily produced by a handful of specialized communities which would have widely distributed their products. It is therefore expected that there would be a standardization...
A Pyro-Engraved Gourd from Cahuachi: Iconographic and Technical Analysis of a Nasca Masterpiece (2018)
Pyro-engraved gourds discovered by the "Nasca Project" (CEAP) in Cahuachi, Nasca ceremonial center located in the basin of Río Grande, can provide new data about their manufacture and decoration. From a comparative perspective, we study artifact characteristics and archaeological records to understand an unusually large and complex pyro-engraved found during 1994 excavations as an offering associated with ceramics from the last phase of the Early Horizon (Ocucaje 8-9) and the beginning of the...
Quebrada Debris Flows, Hydrology, and Agriculture at Tacahuay Tambo (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents a survey of the debris flow deposits, hydrology, and agriculture at Tacahuay Tambo, a Late Intermediate (1000-1476 AD) site located on south coast of Peru. Quebrada Tacahuay in combination with the Tambo, has 12,000 years of cultural history. Therefore, there are numerous flood deposits that add to the complexity of the stratigraphy....
Quebrada Jaguay-280 (QJ-280) under the Microscope: A Geoarchaeological Investigation of the Site Formation and Anthropogenic Features at a Peruvian Coastal Site (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some of the earliest evidence for human settlement of Peru comes from lowland sites along the arid Pacific coast. Localities at Huaca Prieta, Quebrada Tacahuay, and Quebrada Jaguay demonstrate that during the Terminal Pleistocene, people had settled the coast and had incorporated marine resources into their subsistence strategy. Excavations led by Daniel...
The Question of Permanence: Understanding Head Shaping as a Process (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent conversations about body modification demonstrate that alterations to human form are experiential and are not solely oriented towards a final product. In thinking of prehistoric head shaping practices—practices engaged in with the bodies of infants—archaeological...
Quichunque: Un santuario inca de altura en la sierra norte de Lima (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Quichunque es un sitio arqueológico con indicios de haber tenido “génesis” local y evidencia de reocupación inca. Es el resto de un santuario de altura con infraestructura monumental superpuesto sobre la cima y laderas superiores de una montaña a 4.798 m. Su posición espacial privilegiada con vista a las principales cordilleras y montañas de la sierra...
Quicksilver and Cruelty: Violence at the Santa Bárbara Mining Encampment in Huancavelica, Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The colonization of the Americas by the Spanish presents a unique context for exploring structural violence. The rapacious extractivism practiced by the colonizers led to the immeasurable destruction of indigenous communities, particularly those working as tributary labor. At the nexus of the colonial mining industry were the mercury mines of Santa Bárbara in...
Quilcapampa and Points of Convergence in Middle Horizon Arequipa: Faunal Evidence for Extensive Interregional Interaction (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Wari and the Far Peruvian South Coast: Final Results of Excavations in Quilcapampa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Quilcapampa was an important point of convergence for communities from around the southern Andean region with these people and/or their material culture suggesting extensive interregional interaction. The zooarchaeological work conducted on the vertebrate remains from Quilcapampa will be presented in this...
Quilcapampa: A Wari Colony on an Interregional Trail on the Coast of Southern Peru (2018)
In the ninth century AD, Wari settlers founded the site of Quilcapampa in the Sihuas Valley of southern Peru. The first definitive Wari settlement in Arequipa, the site was founded astride an inter-valley trade route that had been used for at least a millennium. This paper will discuss both the site's clear link to Wari, as evidenced by its architecture, ceramics, and foodways, as well as the possible links to the Nazca region where Wari control was likely fractured due to conflict and possible...
Quispi Rumi: Geochemically Sourcing Obsidian from the Patipampa Sector of Huari (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. From 2017-2018, over 1,000 obsidian artifacts were excavated from the Patipampa sector of Huari, once the administrative capital of the Wari state. During the 2018 season, over 350 artifacts were analyzed via portable X-ray fluorescence (PXRF) and then fingerprinted to Andean obsidian sources when...
Radiocarbon Dates from the Necropolis of Ancón, Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Necropolis of Ancón, Peru represents one of the largest pre-contact cemeteries in the Andes, with more than 3,000 burials and tens of thousands of associated grave goods excavated from the site. Despite more than a century of archaeological research at the Necropolis, not a single C-14 date from the burial ground has ever been published. In this...
Radiocarbon Dating and Carbon/Nitrogen Stable Isotope Analysis of Human Skeletons from the Lambayeque Valley, North Peru (Formative to Inca) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We analyzed 73 human bone/tooth samples from the following archaeological sites of the Lambayeque Valley, North Peru: Huaca Rajada, Huaca Zarpán, Huaca Santa Rosa, Huaca El Pueblo, Huaca El Chorro, Huaca El Triunfo, Huaca Saltur and Huaca Ventarrón. The associated material culture indicates that this sample encompasses a deep and continuous time transect going...
The Ramada Mortuary Tradition: At the Crossroads of Nasca and Wari in the Vitor Valley, Southern Peru (2018)
In this paper, we discuss the mortuary tradition affiliated with the Ramada communities that inhabited the Vitor Valley of Southern Peru around 550 CE. Our field excavations in 2012 and 2015 revealed a long-standing tradition of mortuary treatment that persisted even after the arrival of the Wari in the area. While many components of this tradition appear to have originated locally, other components closely parallel Nazca populations, including patterns of trauma, funerary ritual and the...
Raw Material Sourcing of Two Terminal Pleistocene Sites in Southern Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I present a raw materials analysis from two terminal Pleistocene-aged sites in southern Peru: Quebrada Jaguay 280 (QJ-280) and Cuncaicha. Each site’s debitage assemblage contains multiple lithic raw material types, including obsidian, chalcedony, petrified wood, jasper, and andesite. While the obsidian has been sourced to the highland Alca volcanic field, no...
(Re)constructing the Social Structure of Society at Cerro Tortolita through Its Ceramic Assemblage (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Developments through Time on the South Coast of Peru: In Memory of Patrick Carmichael" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this study I use the ceramic assemblage at Cerro Tortolita as a means of addressing issues related to social differentiation. Cerro Tortolita is an Early Intermediate period site occupied from about AD 250–450 in the Upper Ica Valley on the south coast of Peru. It includes a large ceremonial...
Re-tying a Wayu: Connecting a Cranial Mask in the Smithsonian to Its Community of Origin in Huarochirí, Peru (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Arqueología colaborativa en los Andes: Casos de estudios y reflexiones" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To prehispanic Andeans in central Peru, donning a facial-bone mask, a wayu, reanimated the dead and honored ancestral victories. Following these masks’ description in the c. 1608 Quechua-language manuscript of Huarochirí, scholars presume Spanish priests destroyed them to extirpate the “idolatry” of ancestor worship....
Real Roads and Imaginary Borders: Exploring Northern and Central Andean Cultural Trajectories and Interactions from the Perspective of the Ceja de Selva during the First Millenium BCE (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Cuando los senderos divergen: Reconsiderando las interacciones entre los Andes Septentrionales y los Andes Centrales durante el 1ro y 2do milenio AEC / When Paths Diverge: Reconsidering Interactions between the Northern and Central Andes, First–Second Millennium BCE" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The border between Peru and Ecuador has often been viewed heuristically as a boundary between the cultures of the Northern...
Reassessing Wari Power in the Central Andes: Local Agency, Trade, and Competition in the Cusco Region (2018)
The Wari state of the Central Andes has traditionally been interpreted as an expansive polity that incorporated numerous provinces during the Middle Horizon (A.D. 600-1000). Most research has focused on the large Wari installations built in several regions of Peru, leading many scholars to conclude that Wari administrators established direct imperial control over these areas. More recently, scholars have started to adopt a complementary bottom-up approach to study changes experienced at the...
Recent Research in Copacabana, Bolivia, the Intinkala Sector (2018)
Copacabana has been a pilgrimage destination and a site of extraordinary reverence from Formative times to the present. Together with the Islands of the Sun and Moon, it formerly comprised one the most sacred ceremonial complexes in the Inca Empire. Recent archaeological research in Copacabana has focused on the Intinkala sector located just east of the modern basilica. The principal aim of the first season was to ascertain the nature of Inca engagement with this powerful locale as evidenced...
Reciprocal Feasting and Access to Foodstuffs at Huaca Colorada (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Feasting has long been acknowledged as a central element in Andean social and economic life. Crucial to this emphasis on feasting during the Late Moche period (AD 600–850) is the need for tribute and the redistribution of the goods brought in by...