The Development of ‘Peripheral Communities’ in the Eastern Andes

Summary

The Chachapoya have come to be seen as a peripheral cultural entity in relation to the broader pre-Columbian Andes, yet little work has addressed how these ‘peripheral’ communities developed in relation to each other. While it is clear that the material culture that is manifestly associated with the Chachapoya developed prior to AD 1000, it is unclear how uniform this process was on a regional level. In the pre-Columbian Andes the development of centralized and partitioned monumental architecture has been commonly used as evidence for social and political transformations. This paper utilizes a scalar perspective to position the social and political changes of the Chachapoya on a regional level. Further, in order to better understand the development of Chachapoya communities, this paper addresses the significance of centrality for one such community, Purumllaca de Soloco, and the role that the construction of its monumental architecture and the accretional changes of the surrounding settlement played in the social and political development of its community.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• What was Chachapoyas?: Towards a cultural geography of the northeastern Peruvian Andes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage