A Movable Feast: Mobility and Commensalism in the Andes

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "A Movable Feast: Mobility and Commensalism in the Andes" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Movement and feasting are key themes in the modern study of archaeology. While the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of these two have received considerable attention, they have mostly been tackled individually. Here we focus on the role of movement (caravans, pilgrimages, trade networking) in creating the social, economic and political setting for feasting to occur. As such we understand feasting as a political mechanism by which society negotiates inter- and intra-community commensality, peer-to-peer and peer-to-commoner conspicuous consumption, as well as wider elite and community interactions with the sacred. Here we welcome papers that focus on unravelling the methodological and material correlates that link movement and feasting across the spectrum in the prehispanic Andes. These approaches can include, among others, stable isotope analysis of faunal and human remains; genetics; and chemical, geological, and stylistic study of archaeological material including spatial analysis and circuit theory research.