Beyond the Round House: Spatial Logic and Settlement Organization across the Late Andean Highlands

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Beyond the Round House: Spatial Logic and Settlement Organization across the Late Andean Highlands," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This session examines the socio-spatial logic of late Andean settlements, where architectural preservation is often excellent, and considers how these logics varied across the highlands. These sites are typically large villages and towns of round houses that appear to have grown organically without apparent "order," and they are sometimes described in terms of what they lack (public architecture, plazas, central planning, etc.) Here, we focus on how these spaces actively structured social, political, and economic organization. For example, what was the size and arrangement of social building blocks such as families, lineages, and larger groups? Over time, where did new generations and new arrivals settle and build? How did people move through the settlement as they went about daily tasks? What did they see, and what did they know about their neighbors? How were the dead placed in relation to the spaces of the living? Did communities continue previous traditions of socio-spatial organization and architectural construction, or did the foundation of new settlements entail the creation of new forms of order? What changed with the transition to Inca rule? This session aims to achieve a better understanding of these continuities and contrasts across late Andean societies of the highlands.