andes (Other Keyword)
51-75 (135 Records)
Spindle whorls have historically been subjected to less archaeological attention than other artifact classes. This dearth of analysis may reflect an underestimation of the insights to be gained from spindle whorls, in terms of archaeological interpretations of gender, status, and exchange patterns, which may be much greater than previously acknowledged. The case study presented here examines a sample of spindle whorls from the Casma capital city of El Purgatorio, Peru. We examine their...
A GIS of Movement and Sensory Experience at a Planned Colonial Town in Highland Peru (2016)
GIS in archaeology has diversified beyond its origins as a map-and-database and predictive modeling tool to explore multidimensional views of human experience in the past. This paper combines models of movement and visibility at the scale of a single settlement to render an approximation of sensory experience within the built environment of a planned colonial town in highland Peru. In the 1570s, some 1.5 million native Andeans were forcibly resettled to “reduction towns” (reducciones) based on a...
The Head as the Seat of the Soul: A Medium for Spiritual Reciprocity in the Early Andes (2016)
There are many visual representations spanning the different time periods of the ancient Andes, and corroborated by historic accounts, that point to man’s spiritual essence as residing in the head, and more specifically, head hair. These examples suggest that this power was transferable and maintained the reciprocal balance between men, and the earthly and supernatural realm. This presentation briefly discusses the human head and hair in Andean belief as a conduit for the flow of spiritual power...
High and Low: Highland and Coastal Dress in the Andean Region, 100-800 (2015)
Dress can be a key aspect of stating a cultural or ethnic identity. Garment shapes, textile techniques, and accessories all contribute to creating a particular ensemble that can define a group identity. This effect can be heightened in the representation of dress, as the artist and patrons decide what are the essential elements that are worth depicting, and as the medium of representation dictates what can and cannot be conveyed visually. This paper examines the similarities and differences in...
High C4 plants consumption from the Late Intermediate period in Cuzco region. (2017)
Maize was one of the important crops for Inca political economics as a ritual and a staple food. In previous study of sacrificed children mummies found at Mt. Llullaillaco, the individuals particularly consumed C4 resources (such as maize, amaranth and domestic animals raised with C4 plants) in ritual activities. Contrary, the dietary compositions of Machu Picchu skeletons have shown diversity. The individuals from Mt. Llullaillaco and Machu Picchu were most probably immigrated from different...
Houses of Colonial Chiefly Authority: Local Elites in the Social Order of Mawchu Llacta, a Colonial Reducción Town in the Southern Highlands of Peru (2017)
As a result of the Toledan Reforms in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the late fifteenth century, new settlements known as reducciones were established to centralize indigenous populations. Such is the case of Mawchu Llacta, originally Espinar de Tute, in the Caylloma Province, Arequipa. The introduction of these sweeping reforms brought a series of major changes to the social order. External agents were established as the new bearers of power and local elites took on a secondary status. However,...
Hunter’s Paradise or Hypoxic Wasteland? Recent Research in the Pucuncho Basin, Peru (2016)
Mountain regions above 4000 m have been considered marginal because of low temperatures and low primary productivity compounded by the physical stress of hypoxia. Yet, the archaeological record of the puna (grasslands above 3800 m) of the Andes demonstrates widespread, persistent occupations by hunter-gatherers. The intensity and seasonality of these occupations offer insights into these regions of Peru and of the entry of people into South America more generally. New excavations at the...
Identifying Possible Inca Census Records in Khipu from Pachacamac (2015)
One of the primary categories of data recorded by the Incas on their knotted string accounting devices (khipu) is detailed census numbers from different administrative units, yet no existing khipu has been identified as containing such population records. In this analysis, Inca concepts of age categories and hierarchical ranking are used to predict a number of different formats for recording census data. Existing data tables of khipu were examined to determine if any matched these expectations,...
Ideología y rituales de lluvia compartidos por los yungas del Período Cerámico Inicial (1,600 a.C.) y las poblaciones serranas del presente en la cuenca del Rímac, Costa Central del Perú. (2015)
Investigaciones en el sitio arqueológico La Explanada de Unión-Ñaña, ubicado a 772 msnm, en las laderas del cerro La Parra en Ñaña, margen norte del valle del Rímac. Permitieron vislumbrar inadvertidas modalidades de culto, en el extenso macizo que configura el cerro La Parra, santuario de montaña del Período Inicial (1,600 a.C.) en el valle medio del Rímac. Las excavaciones, revelaron rituales propiciatorios, que evocan los rituales en uso, en la vecina población altoandina de San Antonio de...
Imperial authority and local agency: Investigating the interplay of disruptive technology, indirect authority, and changing ritual practice at Dos Cruces. (2017)
The Chimu smelting site of Dos Cruces is located along the Zaña River in the middle valley of the greater Lambayeque area. Dos Cruces is located at the intersection of two major trade routes and nearby several rich sources of copper ore. The smelting of ore at Dos Cruces utilized wind powered smelting technology, a new innovation for this region. Despite its obvious Chimu affiliations, Dos Cruces lacks an audiencia, or indeed any indication of Chimu administrative oversight. The denizens of Dos...
Indigenous Anatomies (2016)
Bioarchaeological research in the Andes has shed important light on Andean lifestyles in the past. From identifying diseases such as tuberculosis and juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, to analyzing migrations, dietary patterns and interpersonal violence, bioarchaeology has demonstrated a unique capacity to evaluate certain categories of human behavior not accessible through other forms of analysis. For the purposes of interpreting the past, bioarchaeologists broadly view the body as a complex...
Infra-structuration of Imperial Power in Ancient Ankgor and the Andes (2015)
A comparison of the agricultural reclamation projects and religious architectural programs of the Chimú, Inka, and Angkorian empires will serve to demonstrate that statecraft was an inherently technological pursuit in ancient societies. Supra-local political regimes were literally built by and through infrastructure that reconfigured different communities of practice. An important objective of the paper is to demonstrate that an analysis of the materials, temporalities, and technologies...
The Infrastructure of Community: Agricultural intensification and the development of corporate groups at Hualcayán, Peru (2015)
This paper examines how the construction of agricultural infrastructure was essential to the constitution of a new kind of community in the highland Andes after the collapse of the regional Chavín religion (500/200 BC). It presents recent excavation data from Hualcayán—a long occupied ceremonial center in Ancash, Peru—to discuss how local people reorganized their community when they abandoned a central Chavín mound and built segregated structures for agricultural production, such as terraces,...
The Interior Frontier: Intercultural Exchange in the Formative Period (1000 B.C.-A.D. 400) of Quillagua, Antofagasta Region, northern Chile (2017)
Today the modern village of Quillagua, an oasis in the hyperarid Atacama Desert, is of limited regional economic importance. However, there is strong evidence to support the argument that, in the past, the village was a node of ancient routes linking the populations of the Pampa, the Pacific Coast, the River Loa, and the Salar of Atacama. Documents from the 18th century suggest that Quillagua was, in fact, an "internal frontier" between populations residing to the north and south of the oasis....
Interlinking Practices and Community Assemblages: Agriculture and ritual in ancient Hualcayán, Peru (2018)
This paper combines assemblage theory with ritual economy in the study of long-term community formation at prehistoric Hualcayán, in highland Ancash, Peru. In particular, it explores how the people of Hualcayán interlinked and coordinated their practices of building, food production, and ritual consumption to assemble a Recuay community during the Andean Early Intermediate Period (AD 1–700). It traces the archaeological evidence of how religious ideologies, social group divisions, and...
Intersubjectivity in Inka Visual Culture (2016)
The Inka of western South America, who reached the height of their power in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, identified certain rocks as sharing many characteristics with human beings. Such rocks were sentient and some of them had the ability to speak and move. Some rocks were said to eat and drink the foods and liquids humans eat and drink, dress in human clothing, and speak Runasimi, the language spoken by the Inka. The Inka, in recognizing the sentience of certain rocks, practiced...
Irreducible Reducción: Archaeological Microhistory at Mawchu Llacta, a Planned Colonial Town in Highland Peru (2017)
The Reducción General de Indios (General Resettlement of Indians) in the Viceroyalty of Peru brought about one of the largest mass resettlement programs ever enacted by a colonial power, forcibly displacing some 1.5 million native Andeans to compact towns (reducciones) built around plazas and churches. As a colonial utopic project, the Reducción was to remake the Andean world in the ideal self-image of Spanish civic and religious community. As materialized manifestations in the Andean...
Itinerant Agents: Colonial Representatives at the Obraje de Chincheros (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Itinerant Bureaucrats and Empire" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Obraje (textile mill) de Chincheros, located in the Apurímac region of Peru, was established in the late Sixteenth Century and operated throughout the Spanish colonial period. At the Obraje men, women and children worked long, hard hours to pay the taxes demanded of them from the colonial Spanish government. As men had to serve a forced labor...
Laboring in Tiwanaku's Moquegua Colony: A Bioarchaeological Activity Indicator Comparison Using Population-Based and Life Course Approaches (2015)
Diverse, lower elevation areas were home to producers and procurers of goods not easily grown or obtainable in the South Central Andean heartland of the Tiwanaku state. Various Tiwanaku colonial settlement clusters, near present-day Moquegua, Peru, comprised one such region. Tiwanaku colonists in this area participated in activities that included farming of corn and coca, as well as transportation of goods between the heartland and colony. For example, Omo-style (Omo M16D and Rio Muerto M70...
Land-Use Change and Its Impact on Archaeological Sites in the Nepeña Valley, 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 Nepeña Valley, located in northern Peru, is home to several important archaeological sites spanning the complete prehistoric chronology in the Peruvian Andes. During the COVID pandemic after 2019, much of the oversight and efforts at cultural preservation and archaeological preservation were halted due to a national shutdown. During this shutdown, land...
Lessons from the Tello Obelisk- domestication and plant use at Chavin de Huantar, Peru (2015)
The work of Dolores Piperno has significantly advanced our understanding of the rise of agriculture in the tropical Americas. Her work has been fundamental in the development of microbotanical techniques used to understand the use of plants in the past. This paper builds off of Dolores' analysis of plants depicted on the Tello Obelisk, at the site of Chavin de Huantar in Peru, in order to consider the role that plants from distinct ecological zones across the Andes played at the temple site....
Life at Achanchi: A High Altitude Chanka Burial Site from the Andahuaylas Region of Southern Peru (2015)
Recent archaeological research from a high elevation (4,000 masl) hilltop site in the Andahuaylas region of southern Peru offer new data to illuminate aspects of life and social organization within the Chanka society that lived during the tumultuous Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1400). In contrast to the machay (or cave) burials typical of this time period, an intramural burial site excavated from the ridgetop site of Achanchi may offer another perspective of this localized polity. This...
Liturgical textiles from the Spanish colonial reducción of Santa Cruz de Tuti, Colca Valley, Peru (2017)
A highly visible symbol within the church, liturgical cloth plays an important role in the communication of ideas about the wealth and authority of the Catholic Church. During the colonial period in the Andes, the influence of liturgical textiles extended to reinforcing ideas about the power of the Spanish Empire as well as the role of indigenous populations within it. Although cloth production during the period of Spanish colonization is a subject discussed to some extent by art historians...
The Lives of Mountains: A Cultural Orogeny in Peru's North Highlands (2016)
There is no more palpable or ambivalent a presence in the Andean landscape than that of mountains--distant and harboring, fertile and terrible, rocky and liquid, inviting and impervious. Yet their understanding for Andean groups is only in its infancy, and largely informed by insights from Inka, colonial and ethnographic studies. This paper focuses on pre-Inka engagements with 'mountains' as nonhuman beings on the landscape, especially around Peru's Cordillera Blanca. I am interested in when and...
Local Ritual and Social Change in the Andean Formative Period at Hualcayán, Peru (2016)
Research in the Andes has long focused on how early complex societies performed elaborate rituals in monumental spaces to both organize communities and establish authority. In pursuing this research for the Formative Period (1800-1 BC), comparisons between local ritual practices and the regional traditions of Kotosh and Chavín have overshadowed the study of how and why communities selectively altered and replaced ritual practices over the long term. For example, how did different generations...