Central Andes (Other Keyword)
1-9 (9 Records)
Archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence indicates that, for the Inca Empire and the Spanish Viceroyalty, the Rimac and Lurin Valleys on central Peruvian coast served as a key regional hub for religious and administrative activities. The nature of regional interactions prior to Inca imperial influence in this area, however, remains unclear. Well-known historical narratives claim populations from the adjacent Huarochirí highlands defeated coastal Ychsma populations for agricultural land, but...
Early Horizon Foodways and Settlement Nucleation: Preliminary Insights From Samanco, a Maritime Center in the Nepeña Valley, North-Central Peru (2016)
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...
Lauricocha v2.0: Ancient highlanders grant new insights into the pre-Columbian population history of South America (2015)
The Lauricocha caves in Peru were the first known evidence for an Early Holocene presence of humans in the high altitude Andes. However, critical examination of the excavation reports cast doubts on the status and significance of Lauricocha in the archaeological record of South America. Here, we present a thorough revision of site including new radiocarbon dates, as well as morphological, craniometric, and genome-wide genetic data obtained from the human remains found at the site. Our results...
A Paleogenetic Perspective on the Early Population History of the High Altitude Andes (2016)
The peopling of the high altitude Andes marks an important episode in South American population history, eventually leading to the formation of the most complex societies of the late pre-Columbian period, namely Wari, Tiwanaku, and Inca. Little is known about how population dynamic processes and genetic adaptation to physical stressors like hypoxia shaped the genetic diversity of the Andean highland populations over the ~10,000 years of human presence in high altitude leading to the emergence of...
Pernil Alto – a Preceramic Horticulturalist Village in Palpa, Southern Peru (2015)
In the Central Andes, plants and animals were domesticated during the Middle Preceramic period (8000-5000 BP). The earliest civilizations, like Caral (Shady 1999,2006), arose around 5000 BP. This process of increasing complexity, however, is far from being understood completely. Whereas most sites of the Middle Preceramic Period with early domesticated plants, like Chilca 1 (Engel 1988), La Paloma (Engel 1980, Benfer 1999) and Huaca Prieta (Bird 1985, Dillehay et al.2012) are located on the...
Reevaluating the end of the Early Intermediate Period on the Peruvian coast from the perspective of the Lima culture (2017)
El fin del Periodo Intermedio Temprano en la arqueología peruana ha sido cronológicamente ubicado alrededor del 600 AD y culturalmente es representado por el final de culturas costeñas como Moche, Lima y Nasca. Alrededor del 600 AD hay evidencia de un evento extraordinariamente fuerte de El Niño, el cual ha sido registrado en sitios arqueológicos desde Piura hasta Lima. Este evento (o eventos), fue anteriormente interpretado como una importante causal de la caída de estas culturas costeñas, sin...
Social Memory and the Re-Use of Archaeological Ruins: Preliminary Insights from a Chimú-Inka Elite Gravesite at Samanco, Nepeña Valley, Peru ca. 1470-1534 CE (2017)
Social memory and ancestor veneration are recurring themes throughout Andean belief systems. Yet, the relationship between ancient Andeans and the archaeological ruins they encountered remains an underexplored research topic. Recent fieldwork at Samanco, an Early Horizon coastal settlement in the Nepeña Valley, shows intriguing mortuary practices of reutilizing site ruins as cemeteries. After an abandonment hiatus over several centuries, Samanco’s ruins of stone enclosures were reutilized as a...
Symbolic patterns of Northern Peruvian Coast pottery in Inca times (2016)
The present study proposes a comparative analysis of the iconography and morphology of ritual pottery produced in the Northern Peruvian Coast during the Late Intermediate Period and Late Horizon. Ceramics produced in that region during the 15th century presents several changes in the attributes of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic protagonists (here addressed as "figures of power") when compared to those of prior periods. Such modifications in the symbolic patterns suggests aspects of ancestry, ...
The Terminal Pleistocene-Early Holocene transition and settlement discontinuities in the arid Central Andes (2015)
The Central Andean region poses numerous environmental challenges, including hyper-aridity, rugged topography, strong seasonality, uneven spatial distribution of biotic resources, and high altitude, yet this area was colonized successfully in the Terminal Pleistocene. However, the archaeological record shows considerable discontinuity through the Terminal Pleistocene-Early Holocene transition, with site occupation hiatuses or abandonments often interpreted as having stemmed from unfavorable...