Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Culture contact has been a driver of stylistic change and ethnogenesis in the southern valleys of Peru since the Formative Period. During the Middle Horizon, local groups reacted to contact with the Wari and Tiwanaku polities. Interactions with intrusive colonists resulted in broadly shared stylistic features but also generated greater stylistic cultural heterogeneity. In the periods that followed, which saw the blending of highland and coastal traditions within the valleys of the southern Andes, further diversification took place. This is especially true for the Moquegua valley, where communities produced goods representing Cabuza, Tumilaca, Chiribaya, Estuquiña, Gentilar, and San Miguel styles during the Late Intermediate Period. These groups selectively retained elements of Middle Horizon material culture and combined these with new motifs and production technologies. Many of these groups also occupy neighboring valleys, and thus during the LIP different groups existed in contact with one another prior to the arrival of the Inka Empire. The southern valleys of Peru have a rich history of local cultural diversity punctuated by periods of engagement with intrusive polities. The goal of this session is to explore the multiple ways people signaled cultural diversity in Southern Peru through various archaeological analyses.