andes (Other Keyword)
76-100 (135 Records)
In the final decades before the Spanish invasion of the Andes, the Inka Empire struggled to maintain its eastern frontier against the imminent threat posed by the invading lowland Chiriguano peoples. Located within this sparsely populated and loosely connected borderland region was the settlement of Pulquina Arriba, an Inka tampu (waystation) strategically constructed along a preexisting indigenous road network that ran adjacent to a rich river valley. The area’s inhabitants were involved in...
Manq'asiñani: Political Dimensions of Foodways on the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia during the Formative and Tiwanaku Periods (2016)
Multi-year excavations at four sites on the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia have produced rich plant, faunal, ceramic, and isotopic data that shed light on early foodways in the Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes. In this paper, we explore the roles food played for the various political entities that emerged and subsided throughout the Formative (1500 BC-AD 400) and Tiwanaku (AD400-1100) periods. From the small, autonomous village polities of the earlier Formative periods to larger, political centers...
Mapping and feature classification of low altitude orthomosaics using geospatial image analysis in a planned colonial town in highland Peru (2015)
Large archaeological settlements with complex architecture have been always difficult to map. The introduction of unmanned aerial vehicles to fly over sites has helped reduce the time and increase precision of archaeological mapping; nevertheless post-processing time is still a workflow bottleneck. We present a geospatial imagery-based methodology for identifying and mapping surficially-visible structures and environmental features at a late pre-Hispanic and colonial settlement with extensive...
Mapping Lines and Lives at the Sajama Lines, Bolivia: A Model for Ritualized Landscapes (2017)
Ritual trails and geoglyphs in the Andes date back as far as 400 BC and are perhaps best represented in the Nasca lines and the ceques of Cusco. In western Bolivia, the Sajama lines are a network of ritual trails that cover an estimated 22,000 square kilometers and connect pucaras, chullpas, villages, and chapels. Although this ritualized landscape was heavily modified during the Colonial (1532-1820) and Republican (1821-1952) eras, these pathways had prehistoric use by the local Carangas. These...
Mapping the Mines: Simulating Transit Routes between Mining Centers in the Colonial Andes with GIS (2017)
Least cost path has been the method most commonly employed by archaeologists in attempts to determine routes from one site to another. This is due to the relative ease of use of this particular tool, as well as because of the parsimonious logic of this approach. The tool is also particularly useful where material remains of roads are no longer visible. However, the use of network analysis provides a more realistic possible route by taking into account known possible paths. Network analysis...
The materiality of emotion: Steps toward understanding affective experience in the South Andes (2015)
Anthropologists routinely acknowledge the affective significance of things. Display and use of objects (in rituals and performances) can evoke strong emotions. Elaborate objects may be used to forge consensus, to evoke memory, or to foster solidarity and express shared interests. Alternatively, displays may divide opinion, generating a diverse response. Understanding the role of emotions in the past is crucial, both for creating rich and nuanced pictures of past societies, as well as for...
Mortuary analysis of juvenile burials in the sacristy of a Spanish colonial reducción in the southern highlands of Peru (2017)
Mortuary practices at Spanish colonial sites in Latin America varied in terms of burial location, style of burial, and associated grave goods. Understanding burial practices is one way to investigate shifting identities, conversion to Catholicism, and the degree of control over and involvement of priests in daily life at colonial sites. The mortuary practices at the reducción (planned colonial town) of Santa Cruz de Tuti (today known as Mawchu Llacta, Colca Valley, Peru) reveal nuanced insights...
Nighttime Sky and Early Urbanism in the High Andes (2016)
Popular understanding of the relationship between the rise of early civilization and astronomy emphasizes the observance of particular moments in the cycle of the sun. This pattern is particularly strong at the Bolivian highland Andean site of of Tiwanaku (AD 500-950), a megalithic site known for its “Temple of the Sun”, “Gateway of the Sun”, and solstice festival that attracts thousands. Recent research throughout the Titicaca Basin documents a wide range of celebrated astronomical observations...
Not Quite One and the Same: Repetition and Rule in the Inka Provinces (2017)
The use of molds for pottery manufacture is an integral part of the ceramic tradition of the North Coast of Peru, dating to at least as early as AD 100. Analysis of mold-made Chimu-Inka monkey effigy vessels excavated from mortuary contexts at the sites of Farfan and Tucume suggest that Late Horizon fineware production occurred in local workshops rather than in a centralized facility—a pattern consistent with other studies of Inka pottery production from around the Central Andes. The use and...
Ontologies of water: intensities and magnitudes (2017)
Increasingly, the effects of global warming take the form of destructive movements of water, whether vanishing bodies of water that create desertification or floods that damage human habitations and take lives. The extensive archaeological record of the North Coast of Peru offers a place to study long-term human strategies for living with the dangerous and unpredictable movement of water. Despite frequent earthquakes, floods and torrential rains that re-shape land- and sea-scapes, humans...
Ordering Buildings, Building Order: Place Production in a Planned Colonial Town in Highland Peru (2015)
In the 1570s, the Viceroy of Peru Francisco de Toledo instituted one of the largest forced resettlement programs in world history: the Reducción General de Indios (General Resettlement of Indians). Some 1.4 million native Andeans were forcibly resettled into over 1,000 planned colonial reducción ("reduction") towns built on gridded street plans throughout the viceroyalty. Through the media of the built environment, the Reducción was to be a means of generating a new social order from the ground...
The Origins and Development of Arsenic Bronze Technologies on the North Coast of Peru: Preliminary Results from Archaeometric and Experimental Investigations (2017)
This paper highlights the preliminary results of an ongoing study that aims to further characterize the origins and subsequent development of arsenic bronze technologies on the north coast of Peru. While the production of arsenic bronze on the north coast has been studied in detail over the last several decades, the spatial and temporal origins for the use/production of these alloys – and how they spread throughout the region during the Middle Horizon (600 – 1000 CE) period – are not yet fully...
Oxygen and Carbon Isotope Chemistry and Maize Beer Consumption in the Prehistoric Andes: An Experimental Pilot Study (2015)
The consumption of alcohol in prehistory is a much-studied subject, largely because alcoholic beverages were often central to social engagement, and the organization of many political, economic and religious institutions. While the role of alcohol is known to have been an important component of many societies, the ability to recognize alcohol in prehistoric contexts has proven difficult. As a result of this, many authors investigating alcohol in prehistory have used indirect indicators such as...
Panquilma’s Architecture: Ideologies involved in the construction process (2016)
This paper explores the ideologies involved in the process of building structures utilized by people of elite and non-elite statuses. The 2015 excavations of compounds at Panquilma revealed a range of domestic and ritual activities. The data recorded suggest that local craft production was embedded in particular religious meanings and/or status paraphernalia related to specific pre-Columbian Late Intermediate Period societies. The association of destruction and regeneration of materials, seen in...
Parsing out Differential Plant Use Among Households During a Period of War in Puno, Peru (2015)
In the Peruvian altiplano near Lake Titicaca during the Late Intermediate period (LIP; A.D. 1100 to 1450) peoples’ lives were overwhelmingly structured by warfare. Martial conflict between competing ethnic groups incited people to live defensively in fortified hilltop villages during the LIP. However, little is known about the agricultural practices and the internal sociopolitical dynamics of these fighting communities. Drawing on recent excavations and macrobotanical data collected from...
Patterns of cranial trauma in the Late Intermediate Period Colca Valley, Peru (A.D. 1000-1450) (2016)
Cranial trauma studies of Late Intermediate Period populations (LIP, A.D. 1000-1450) suggest that conflict and social stress were endemic across the south-central Andes, although the nature of interpersonal violence was strongly mediated by local political and social structures. This study explores how individuals buried in elaborate cliffside tombs from the Colca valley of southern Peru experienced violence across the 400-year period preceding Inka imperialism. Cranial trauma rates show high...
Peopling of the High Andes of Northwestern Argentina (2016)
The goal of this presentation is to review the current evidence in order to model the early peopling of the highlands of Northwestern Argentina. Paleoenvironmental evidence of the late Pleistocene and early Holocene is thoroughly reviewed in order to set the scenario of the process of human settlement at the Puna region of Argentina. I will analyze chronological evidence and the archaeological record –especially the archaeofaunas- of early hunter-gatherer occupations dated between 10,500 to the...
Photogrammetry All the Way Down: Multiscalar and Multiplatform Photogrammetry as Primary Spatial Registry in a Large Excavation Project (2017)
In 2016, a large excavation project was carried out at the site of Mawchu Llacta in the Colca Valley of southern Peru. A colonial reduccíon (planned town), Mawchu Llacta is a large site with plazas, chapels, a parish, and domestic compounds. These spaces all consist of complex standing architecture in varying degrees of preservation. Eleven excavation blocks were opened to better understand ritual and everyday life in the town. The extent and distribution of the excavations, however, presented...
The Politics of Connectivity at Khonkho Wankane, Bolivia (2015)
Located in the southern Lake Titicaca basin of Bolivia, the Late Formative period (200 BC – AD 500) center of Khonkho Wankane was a dynamic place where groups of mobile agropastoralists and caravan drovers engaged with resident ritual specialists. In a social context characterized by diversity, population fluctuation, and mobility, what form did political practice take? I review evidence from Khonkho Wankane for interaction with areas throughout the south central Andes and I explore some of the...
Powerful Things: Stone Sculpture and Landscape Animacy in the Lake Titicaca Basin (2016)
Archaeologists working in the Lake Titicaca Basin have become accustomed to treating Formative material traits - whether a style of decorated pottery, ritual architecture, or stone sculpture – as the “Yayamama Religious Tradition”. This term, originally defined by Sergio Chavez and Karen Mohr Chavez, has become a shorthand to refer to what is presumed to be a common approach to ceremonialism across the Titicaca Basin (see also Chavez 2004). More recently, scholars have associated it with the...
Precolonial irrigation systems and settlement Patterns in the valley of Rimac - Peru. (2017)
This investigation is an archaeological analysis of the lower Rimac River Valley, located in the Peruvian Central Coast, where several irrigation channels, that were originated from the River allowed the cultivation of a great extension of land in this valley. The objectives of this study were to establish the occupation sequence and settlement pattern in those artificial valleys in Precolonial times and their relation with this irrigation system. Modern and old maps and aerial photos were used...
Preliminary Results on Pottery Technology through Macroscopic Classification at the Early Horizon Center of Caylán, Coastal Ancash, Peru (2016)
This poster presents the analysis of ceramic fragments from the Early Horizon center of Caylán, in the Nepeña Valley, Perú (800-1 BC). Ceramic fragments constitute a large portion of excavated artifacts, bringing information on chronology, cultural traditions, and exchange networks. Most are undecorated body sherds that are typically ignored in ceramic analyses. Here we present the macroscopic analysis of ceramic wares from excavated contexts to shed light on patterns of production and potential...
Quantifying Defensibility of Landscapes and Sites in Highland Ancash, Peru (2015)
Warfare, as a social practice, can have profound consequences ranging from reorganization of sociopolitical boundaries to forced migration of communities and large-scale settlement pattern changes. This study quantitatively examines the increased concern for defense in the Early Intermediate Period (EIP) (200 BC–AD 600) by comparing defensibility of archaeological sites to the surrounding landscape in highland Ancash, Peru. Sites located on opposite sides of the Cordillera Blanca, specifically...
Reassessing the Late Andean Period in the Moche Valley: the View from Cerro Huancha (2015)
In this paper I review the history of thinking about the Late Andean Period in the Moche Valley and present recent research from the site of Cerro Huancha, a large center located in a tributary of the Moche River in the chaupiyunga ecological niche. Encompassing the duration of the Inca and Chimu Empires, AD 1000 – 1532, the Late Andean Period was a time of change in political power and Cerro Huancha provides insight to how these two empires administered and interacted with populations in the...
"Rebels" and "Idolators" in the Valley of Volcanoes: An Archaeological and Historical Inquiry of Andagua, Peru, 1000AD-1800AD (2015)
This paper outlines developing dissertation research that integrates archaeological and historical evidence about the community of Andagua and the Ayo Valley in the Southern Peruvian Andes. Constructed as a Spanish colonial reducción, Andagua resides in a seldom-visited highland area, and today is merely considered a rural, provincial neighbor of Arequipa. Andagua, however, has a striking past evident in the substantial prehispanic remains that surround and lie buried beneath the contemporary...