Gardens and Forking Paths: A Genealogy of Landscape and Subject Formation in the Zaña Valley, Peru

Summary

Recent archaeological research has called attention to the performative dimensions of imperial built environments, shedding new light on how regimes and subjects emerge (and persist) in acts of place-making, urban planning, and monumental construction. However, our focus on clarifying the semiotics of imperial architecture has drawn attention away from longer-term process of subjectification and elided the role that landscapes play within them. The study of landscapes in Peru's Zaña valley between the 11th and 18th centuries CE demonstrates that subject formation followed a forking path, taking shape not simply through overt acts of construction and domination but also unanticipated demographic and environmental transformations and halting engagements between subjects and imperial institutions.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Archaeological Approaches to Subjectification

Keywords

Spatial Coverage