Life, land and labour at Yayno (AD 400-800), a Recuay fort in the north highlands of Peru

Summary

This presentation examines the domain of work as part of the social life of fortified settlements. In particular, it is interested in the gargantuan commitment – physical and symbolic – evidenced in defensive architecture. Using data from Yayno, a large mountaintop citadel in the north highlands of Peru (Recuay culture, AD 200-700), work estimates are presented to demonstrate the great labour expenditure in its stonemasonry constructions. Builders combined massive stone blocks (local granites, imported limestones) to construct fortifications and defensible, multistorey residential compounds. The buildings ranged from small to monumental, and from low quality to extremely fine quality construction. The variability is attributable to changing construction styles by phase, defensive strategy, differential labour access and social inequalities. The paper concludes that making walls was indispensable work in the high Andes, both in terms of sheer effort and in terms of embodying group cooperation at different scales. While the compounds cloistered internal groups (segregating competing factions within Yayno), there was also a larger project of protecting the overall settlement that demanded intersubjective work, but located in a greater notion of collectivity. Aptly, then, the labour of defensive walls was to build subjects and community.

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 social lives of forts: Reconsidering the social construction of ancient fortified settlements and their diverse roles in political organization

Keywords

Spatial Coverage