Almost 100 Years since Julio C. Tello: Research at Huaca del Loro, Nasca, Peru

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Almost 100 Years since Julio C. Tello: Research at Huaca del Loro, Nasca, Peru" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The expansion of first-generation empires was a key transformation that impacted societies in a myriad of ways. In the Andes, the Middle Horizon (500–1000 CE) was a time of interregional interaction, influenced by the expansion of the highland Wari. The relationship between the Wari and the coastal Nasca has been debated, especially the role of Huaca del Loro, the largest site during this period. Julio C. Tello (the father of Peruvian archaeology) and his team were the first to investigate the site in 1927, recording rectangular compounds and excavating large collective tombs. William Duncan Strong gave the site its current name in the 1950s and excavated a circular temple, as well as units in the compounds. In the 1980s the circular temple was proposed to have been the result of Huarpa (pre-Wari) expansion. In the 2000s it was suggested that Huaca del Loro was a local settlement of Wari resistance. In this session, we bring together the results of two field seasons at Huaca del Loro that uncovered a Wari D-shaped temple and compounds, indicating the site was a Wari colony with a large residential area. These data broaden our knowledge of the expansion of first-generation empires and local transformations.