Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 1

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 1" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Long-term research in the Cañoncillo Archaeological Complex on the north coast of Peru, conducted by an international, collaborative team of archaeologists, has offered important insights into changing social organization, political structures, and ritual practices over the last 2,000 years in the ancient central Andes. Situated on the southern margin of the Jequetepeque Valley, the complex includes over 25 km2 of monumental architecture, domestic zones, relict fields, and abandoned canals dating from the Formative period to the Spanish colonial era. Sustained archaeological analysis of well-preserved contexts has facilitated analysis of macroscale sociocultural processes that unfolded across the central Andean region. Indeed, the Jequetepeque Valley, the “Crossroads of Empire,” marks an important contact zone between the highlands and the coast and between the northern and southern Moche regions, offering alternative perspectives on dominant archaeological narratives. In this session, we focus on the Late Formative, Late Moche, Transitional (Early Lambayeque), and Late Intermediate period components, examining ritual modes of place-making, intergenerational memory, variable materializations of house and home, and differential enactments of kinship and collectivity. By juxtaposing data from different time periods, we situate sociopolitical transition as an agent-driven process and understand human efforts to build bridges across time, space, and species.