Political Economies on the Andean Coast

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Political Economies on the Andean Coast" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

From Ecuador to northern Chile, the Andean coast was home to diverse polities that have been studied by both archaeologists and historians. These studies have provided extensive datasets for interpreting coastal political economies, but research often emphasizes models developed for the central Andean highlands. Due to differences in environmental factors and sociopolitical organization between the coast and the highlands, in this session we would like to prioritize data and models from diverse coastal polities. From AD 700 to 1570, the Andean coast was home to a variety of different groups that had distinct political economies, but each polity was shaped to some extent by interactions with other coastal groups and access to marine resources and coastal trade. These topics crosscut a wide range of datasets that include analyses of material culture and studies of Spanish chronicles, census data, and legal documents. In this session we will unite research on currency, value, storage practices, exchange, the organization of craft production, hierarchy, and sociopolitical strategies. Through exploring archaeological and historical research, we hope to better reconstruct broad trends and shifts in coastal Andean political economies and long-distance exchange.