Andes: Formative (Other Keyword)
26-50 (112 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological excavations and bioarcheological analyses reveal that marine resources and fishing are main form of sustenance on the north coast of Peru – these traditional fishing practices have endured over 3,000 years. Although the degree of reliance on marine resources has shifted from the Initial Period (1500-1200 cal. BC) to present day, traditional...
Discovery at Cardal, Peru of an Initial Period Polychrome Frieze of the Manchay Culture (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the 2018 field season, the authors unearthed a portion of a large polychrome frieze at the U-shaped civic-ceremonial center of Cardal in the Lurin Valley of Peru. This talk provides a brief description of the excavations and its discovery. The frieze was located on the lower terrace of the right arm of the platform complex and was buried by the...
The Diverse Legacies of the Viru Project (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of Archaeologists in the Andes: Second Symposium, the Institutionalization and Internationalization of Andean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1946 a group of North American archaeologists with Andean experience, undertook a program of research in the Viru Valley, designed to supplement Rafael Larco Hoyle’s seriated sequence of ceramic styles based on vessels from graves and purchased...
Don Lathrap, Precocious Civilization, and the Highland-Lowland Link in Andean Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of Archaeologists in the Andes: Second Symposium, the Institutionalization and Internationalization of Andean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The dynamic interaction between culture areas has been and continues to be important. Traditionally, the boundaries or frontiers between culture areas were considered fixed. Many scholars now recognize that these spaces were fluid and their inhabitants...
Donald Lathrap, the Tropical Forest, and Hemispheric Archaeology (2018)
Donald Lathrap was a visionary anthropologist and archaeologist. His contributions always reflected the "big picture": an understanding that all pre-Columbian culture history was intertwined, and that these connections went back through time to origins in the lowland tropics, or the Tropical Forest. He practiced an archaeology that gave equal weight to iconography and religious thought, and rim sherds and energetics. The most significant issues for Lathrap’s version of American Archaeology, is...
Drilling inside the Structure Atop the Mound: A Potential Lapidary Workshop at Buen Suceso (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The lithic materials recovered from Buen Suceso are varied in use types and materials. This paper will focus on the collections of chipped stone drills excavated from the Unit 6 Structure at the site, located on top of a possible mound. The presence of concentrations of these drills in...
Early Ceremonial Architecture in the Cajamarca Highlands of Peru: A Newly Recorded Circular Court at Callacpuma within the Cajamarca Basin (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents data on a newly recorded monumental circular court located within the Cajamarca Basin of the northern Peruvian Highlands. Large circular courts, better known from the Initial and Formative Periods of the Andean Central coast and highlands, are very rare or at least not well known for the northern Andes. Recent work has investigated an 18...
Early Ceremonial Hearth Use in the Upper Amazon: Santa Anna–La Florida, Palanda, Ecuador (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Illuminated Communities: The Role of the Hearth at the Beginning of Andean Civilization" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the outstanding traits of the Mayo Chinchipe – Marañón culture is the spiral architecture that appears on the mound terraces of at least two major sites of the upper Amazon. In one of them, the vortex of the spiral was a ceremonial hearth that contained a votive cache in its base. The...
Early Monumental Architecture in Peru: Sunken Circular Plazas from the Late Archaic (5000–2600 B.C.) to the Final Formative (400–200 B.C.) (2018)
We hereby focus on a feature of monumental architecture in north and central Peru from the Late Archaic (5000-2600 B.C.) to the Final Formative (400-200 B.C.) respectively illustrated by the sites of Sechín Bajo and Pallka both located in the Casma Valley. This specific feature is the sunken circular plaza (SCP), a public-oriented sunken space whose circular shape runs from 1,5 m to 80 m, as the most extreme examples. Through the record and description of 64 sites –some of them contained several...
Early Ritual and Public Hearths in the Casma Valley, Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Illuminated Communities: The Role of the Hearth at the Beginning of Andean Civilization" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Around 1500 BC, the complex society of the Sechin Alto polity of the Casma Valley, Peru produced a wide variety of architectural forms ranging from large platform mounds to small single room dwellings. Hearths used for public or ritual purposes are frequently associated with some of these...
Early Settlements and Networks of the Formative South-Central Andes: Sunken-Court Distribution and Variation through Systematic Imagery Survey and Targeted Ground-Checking (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By the Middle Formative period (1000–500 BCE), the first permanent architecture appears along the shores of Lake Titicaca in the form of sunken, semi-subterranean courts. These were centers of important public and religious activities and are indicative of emergent forms of permanent political leadership and hierarchies. Thanks to their monumental size,...
Embedded Religiousness and the Kotosh Religious Tradition in the Peruvian Highlands: La Seductora (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at La Seductora identified a circular structure with a central hearth and an underground ventilation shaft. We argue that the structure belongs to the Kotosh Religious Tradition. The KRT tradition dominated the Andean landscape, permeating not only religious interactions but also political and economic ones during the Late Archaic and Formative...
An Endemic Maize (Zea mays L.) Landrace on the Copacabana Peninsula, Bolivia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An endemic variety of maize (Zea mays L) cultivated on terraces around the Copacabana Peninsula between 3600 – 4100 masl has been identified in the altiplano of Bolivia. This is the only known maize variety cultivated above 3600 masl. Indigenous communities in this region refer to this maize variety as tunqu and they consider it sacred. There were wide-spread...
The Environment and Landscape at Buen Suceso, Ecuador (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Buen Suceso, a Formative period Valdivia site, is located in the Culebra-Colin (Manglaralto) valley of Ecuador’s coastal plain, on the lands of the contemporary comuna Dos Mangas, and flanked by the Chongón-Colonche Hills. The site is in a tropical rainforest ecoregion characterized by...
Experiencing Monumentalism in the Late Archaic Cajamarca Highlands of Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Humble Houses to Magnificent Monuments: Papers in Honor of Jerry D. Moore" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A group of people came together in the early third millennium BCE to construct a large circular plaza bounded by concentric walls of free-standing megaliths. This Late Archaic period, 18 m diameter plaza is located near the summit of the site of Callacpuma in the Cajamarca Basin and has been the subject of mapping...
Exploratory Mapping of Relationships between Late Preceramic Monuments and their Dynamic Environment in the Callejón de Huaylas, Peru (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Callejón de Huaylas is a valley in the North Central highlands of Peru located in a dynamic environment prone to environmental hazards such as glacial floods, avalanches, landslides, and seismic activity. However, the abundance of archaeological sites and long-term occupation in the Callejón de Huaylas which spans preceramic to modern times, suggests a...
Exploring Cranial Vault Modification in the Andes Using 3D Imaging Methods (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intentional cranial vault modification (CVM) has long been considered to be a permanent marker of social identity widely practiced among ancient Andean communities. CVM styles are broadly categorized into annular and tabular types among ancient Andean communities, yet there is substantial variability of among them. In this study, we use three-dimensional...
The Extraordinary Case of the Late Preceramic Norte Chico (2018)
The Late Preceramic Period was a time of dramatic cultural transformations in the Central Andes. At the beginning of the 3rd millennium B.C., at least 30 large, sedentary agricultural settlements with monumental architecture appeared between the Huaura and Fortaleza river valleys in a region known locally as the "Norte Chico" ("Little North"). Since the publication of Moseley’s The Foundations of Maritime Civilizations (1975), the north central coast of Peru has been viewed as an exceptional...
Fardos Funerarios de los Antiguos Paracas en el Valle Medio de Chincha, Costa Sur del Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From the Paracas Culture to the Inca Empire: Recent Archaeological Research in the Chincha Valley, Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Este trabajo presenta los resultados del análisis bioarqueológico realizado a ocho fardos funerarios del periodo Paracas Tardío (400-200 BCE) relacionados con el estilo cavernas que fueron recuperados en el Cerro del Gentil, valle de Chincha. Los fardos funerarios asociados a este...
Figuring Things Out: 3D Models of Valdivia Figurines for Research and Outreach (2018)
During excavations at the Valdivia site of Buen Suceso, Ecuador, in 2017 we recovered a number of figurines. Using in-field photogrammetry and post-field processing, we have created digital 3D models of these figurines. For us, the purpose of photogrammetric models is: 1) to facilitate comparisons across assemblages by a variety of scholars, and 2) for use in public education and outreach. While the creation of 3D images via photogrammetry is becoming more common in archaeological practice, the...
Finding Value: Integrating Multiple Datasets to Clarify the Nuances of Past Food Choices (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological studies of ancient foodways focus on understanding subsistence practices in terms of the movement of species over space and time, human/plant/animal strategies, ecological transformations, periods of abundance/famine, economics, and politics. The values that foods are imbued with, the meaning and significance they...
First Insights into the Life of Menocucho: Results of the Archaeological Excavations at Huaca Menocucho, Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, the authors will present the results of their first excavation season at Huaca Menocucho, in the Moche Valley on the north coast of Peru, exposing the political, religious, and economic activities carried out by the people who lived at the site. This excavation revealed the site was first occupied during the Initial period (1800–500 BC),...
Follow the Llamero: the Movement of Plant Foodstuffs in the Andes (2023)
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. The exchange of goods and movement among different ecozones is a hallmark of Andean society. Key to this system of mobility were camelid caravans, which are possibly best known for the Wari or Tiwanaku cultures but are today dwindling in frequency or have disappeared in the Andes. These caravans were established in the much earlier Formative...
From Kotosh to Pacopampa: Sixty-Years of Japanese Investigations on the Andean Formative (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of Archaeologists in the Andes: Second Symposium, the Institutionalization and Internationalization of Andean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the excavations at Kotosh during the 1960’s, the University of Tokyo school of Andean Archaeology has consistently carried out large-scale archaeological researches focusing mainly on the Formative Period of the central Andes. All the archaeologists...
From Mud to Brick, or the Transformative Possibilities of Assembling Architecture (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the often-overlooked practice of building, in order to rethink the role of architecture as a mere container of sociality, a proxy for domestic stability or the precondition of social complexity. By focusing on the building of a wall in the site of Ramaditas, a 2,000-year-old site in the Atacama Desert, this work seeks to question...