Ni la costa ni la sierra: The Archaeology of the Upper Nasca River Basin

Summary

The human and cultural geography of Andean South America has been seen as fundamentally divided between the coast and the highlands since the early days of Spanish colonization; a conceptual bifurcation that is assumed to have great antiquity and has subsequently shaped archaeological research in the region. Better settlement data from the foothills of the southern Nasca valley have demonstrated that the indigenous cultures of the Nasca valley extended much higher into the Andean uplands than previously thought. Surveys and excavations in the headwater valleys of the Nasca's southern tributaries undertaken over the last decade have demonstrated that this pattern extends high into the sierra of southwestern Ayacucho. Rather than forming a border for indigenous south coastal development that was only broken by the expansion of highland empires during the Middle and Late Horizons, the upper Nasca Basin is better seen as a shifting zone of interaction throughout prehistory.

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)   •
• From Foragers to Empires: Recent Research on the South Coast of Peru

Keywords

Spatial Coverage