The role of highland-lowland interaction in political development: a view from the hilltop fort site Ayawiri, in the Andean highlands of Peru.

Summary

The florescence of the pre-Columbian Andean cultural sphere presents a classic, almost trite counter example to the development of highland-lowland relations seen in other areas. Far from marginal, the highlands are where the Inca empire emerged, following the earlier Wari and Tiwanaku states. However, highland-lowland relations were complex and varied; urban societies also developed independently on the Pacific coast, while eastern Amazonian lowlands were often cast as marginal and ‘difficult’. Investigation of the pre-Inka site Ayawiri in the South-Central Andean highlands provides some insight into the changing nature of highland-lowland interraction. Ayawiri was a regional center in the northern Lake Titicaca Basin during the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1450), a period characterized by conflict and a fragmented, fluid political landscape. Somewhat counter-intuitively, interregional contacts were maintained and continued to play a vital role in political and economic organization. Analyses of excavated assemblages (lithic, metal and faunal) suggest that residents’ participation in interregional trade critically contributed to its rise as a regional center. At the same time, they appear to have rejected previously wide-spread ideologies of status and power seen in the Tiwanaku and Upper Formative periods, suggesting that the nature of interregional interaction and trade may have changed substantially.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Connecting highlands and lowlands – Towards a holistic approach to upland and lowland symbiosis in the past, present and for the future

Keywords

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