Crafting Identity and Wealth on the North Coast of Peru

Summary

The "organization of production" is not a monolithic, homogeneous entity in complex empires, and the production of different types of goods will be organized commensurate with the role they play in sociopolitical processes. In this paper, I investigate the ways in which craft production was reorganized after the Inka conquest of the Chimú polity of Peru to control the creation and deployment of wealth and to manipulate the construction of social identity in the changing sociopolitical landscape. Some ceramic production became more centralized under the auspices of the state than it had been under the prior regime, because heretofore most ceramics had not been politically charged. In the case of textiles, authority over production was decentralized. The greater centralization and establishment of attached ceramic production served to consolidate control over symbolic content and the distribution of objects used in political feasting and ritual. In contrast, the decentralization of textile production both precluded provincial administrators from monopolistic control over the production of wealth items and supported state ideological ends. Overall, by assuming control over elite textile production and instituting state-sponsored ceramic production, the Inka co-opted the production and display of social identity and established control over the visual discourses of power.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Imperial Craft: Comparative Perspectives on Production and Society in Empires

Keywords

Spatial Coverage