Them and Us: Transmission and Cultural Dynamism in the North of Peru between AD 250 and 950: A Vision since the Recent Northern Investigations

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Them and Us: Transmission and Cultural Dynamism in the North of Peru between AD 250 and 950: A Vision since the Recent Northern Investigations" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Mochica, Cajamarca, (pre)Chachapoyas, and Huamachuco, among others, have been the focus of attention of the last decades in the northern archaeology. The more we approached an internal understanding of the cultural dynamics of each region, more evidence of contact between them was recorded in the archaeological remains. In recent years the work on the north coast, the north mountain range, and northwestern Peru opened a new debate about the process of cultural transmission and dynamism in the area between AD 250 and 950. A lapse in time that was marked by important climatic altercations, intense movement of populations, and a process of integration that clearly broke with impermeable territorial paradigms; conversely, the ethnic identity that is associated and strengthened by an exposure to the “other.” This symposium looks to analyze and understand the territorial dynamic and the conception that a cultural group had of the others in the valleys of the north coast, the northern mountain range, and the eastern flanks of the Andes. We will discuss aspects of the verticality and horizontality in the Peruvian north, starting with the mobility of goods, diffusion of ideas, populational displacement, stylistic integrations, and the local transformations of foreign elements.