Coalescence and conformity at the Ayawiri hillfort, Peru: A social experiment under duress

Summary

Defensive settlements are often places of relatively rapid, dense nucleation by people with few viable alternatives, resulting in the imperative need to establish new consensual rules for living together. In the Titicaca Basin of Peru, after the collapse of the Tiwanaku state, old political relationships were abandoned and defensive security became essential. In the post-collapse period, large hillfort towns formed by the aggregation of multiple families. What behaviors and attitudes were adopted in these forcibly nucleated places, and how did they mitigate scalar stress (or not)? I draw on Kowalewski’s concept of coalescence, the aggregation of threatened populations into large new communities, a concept initially developed for historic Native American societies of the southeastern US. Coalescence creates the pressing, conscious need to rapidly reformulate the most basic, intimate logics of sociality and the material and spatial realm through which they work. Notably, it typically involves corporate leadership or collective decision-making rather than centralized political hierarchies. Recent investigations at Ayawiri (Machu Llaqta), a densely settled hillfort of the western Titicaca Basin, shed light on the process of coalescence, the nature of social life within the defensive community, and the workings of conformity, publicity, and social distinction.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The social lives of forts: Reconsidering the social construction of ancient fortified settlements and their diverse roles in political organization

Keywords

Spatial Coverage