After the Feline Cult: Social Dynamics and Cultural Reinvention after Chavín

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "After the Feline Cult: Social Dynamics and Cultural Reinvention after Chavín" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

What happens in the north highlands of Peru after Chavín? The current record indicates major cultural transformations, which manifested in many regions and scales. The most prominent developments are associated with major population centers and complexes, yet there has been scant explicit comparison. The orthodox account involves the proliferation of large demographic centers associated with strategic hilltops at the expense of ceremonial centers. Parallel to this is the move away from priestly elites to more secular leaders, more typical of lineage and village heads (kurakas), often “chiefly” leaders who emerge to manage aspects of production (e.g., surplus, herding, warfare, irrigation). But is this right? To what extent do we see variability across the north highlands and adjacent regions? How good is the analogy to historical forms? This session explores post-Chavín “centers” and cultures, taking stock of changing patterns of exchange, stylistic interaction, and pathways to authority. Contributors explore, among other things, the kinds of social interactions encouraged through centers, and perhaps just as important, silenced by them; the ways centers embody, symbolize, and condition people; foci of social life and cosmopolitics in the rise of native leadership and corporate living; Chavín material legacies; and processes of sacralization and de-sacralization.