Powerful Places in the Ancient Andes

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Piscitelli.

During the Late Archaic Period, dramatic cultural transformations took place along the north central coast of Peru in a region known as the Norte Chico. These changes included a transition from hunting-gathering-fishing to farming, more intense social interaction, new kinds of power relationships between leaders and respondent populations, and the construction of monumental ceremonial architecture—all hallmarks of emergent social complexity. This paper moves beyond questions of why people built...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Bowen. John W. Janusek.

The conceptual division of urban and rural, like the parallel division of society and nature, consistently dogs attempts to understand the significance of cities in the highland Andes. Critical approaches to this divide, in fields from geography to literature, have had little impact in reformulating assumptions about the character of urbanism in this world region. This paper examines the Middle Horizon city of Tiwanaku, located in the southern Lake Titicaca basin of the south-central Andes. It...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Lau.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Jennings. Giles Spence-Morrow. Felipe McQueen. Willy Yépez Álvarez.

During the Middle Horizon (AD 650-1050), the site of Quilcapampa la Antiqua in the Sihuas Valley of southern Peru grew from a small village into a major political center. This chapter considers how the growth of Quilcapampa was linked in part to the experiences of people passing through this location. Drawing on Alfred Gell’s idea of “technologies of enchantment”, we examine how the site’s associated geoglyphs, petroglyphs, and pathways marked and gave meaning to a place already ritually charged...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Kosiba.

In creating Cusco, the Incas assembled a landscape of monuments and pathways that embodied a mythic vision of the past. But how did Cusco’s landscape, which was invested with pre-Inca meanings and memories, become Inca? In this paper, I present archaeological and ethnohistorical data from Cusco to explore how Cusco’s indigenous people constructed their past under Inca and early Spanish rule. I examine how pathways and landscapes in Cusco—the processions of the Capac Raymi and Situa ceremonies,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Weismantel.

The power of water is all-important in the long history of Peru’s North Coast: the arid environment, the transformative effects of irrigation, and the devastating force of the ENSO (El Niño) ecological phenomenon. Archaeological theorizing about North Coast societies has often focused on the shaping force of water; this paper suggests bringing emergent thinking about the human/nonhuman relationship to bear on this topic. Twentieth century Western science saw water as something to control through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Roddick. John W. Janusek.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Swenson.

Power in Moche society was fundamentally biopolitical, expressed through the violent deconstruction and reconstruction of bodies, including animate places. An examination of Moche architecture reveals that North Coast populations envisioned built environments as living organisms that were biologically dependent on human communities. The erection and renovation of Moche ceremonial architecture played an instrumental role in the generation of life and the harnessing of vital forces. Therefore,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth DeMarrais.

This presentation explores landscapes of heterarchy, investigating the ways that past peoples inhabited a south Andean landscape. In the northern Calchaquí Valley of Argentina, before the Inkas, power relations were predominantly decentralized and spatially extensive. As a consequence, lived experience, the built environment, and the wider landscape both constituted and reproduced a distinctive social order and cultural logic. Using data from regional survey, I argue first for a habitus that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Guengerich.

The highland Andes underwent major transformations in settlement organization between AD1000-1300, in the first half of the Late Intermediate Period. Settlement patterning shifted to higher altitudes, and in some areas, new sites were accompanied by defensive features. Most research has focused on the structural pressures that led to these changes, such as an increase of violence in the wake of Middle Horizon polity collapse, or a shift to pastoralism as a result of climate change. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bill Sillar.

The paper uses archaeological, historical, ethnographic and geological approaches in an investigation of a small volcano in the department of Cuzco, Peru. Kinsich’ata erupted around 10,000 years ago, but its presence in the landscape is attributed to the animating deity Viracocha in an origin myth that ties Kinsich’ata into a wider narrative cycle locating the social order within the experienced landscape. Kinsich’ata’s eruption disrupted the landscape, altering the path of the river Vilcanota...