The Infrastructure of Community: Agricultural intensification and the development of corporate groups at Hualcayán, Peru

Summary

This paper examines how the construction of agricultural infrastructure was essential to the constitution of a new kind of community in the highland Andes after the collapse of the regional Chavín religion (500/200 BC). It presents recent excavation data from Hualcayán—a long occupied ceremonial center in Ancash, Peru—to discuss how local people reorganized their community when they abandoned a central Chavín mound and built segregated structures for agricultural production, such as terraces, canals, and ritual enclosures. The new infrastructure changed the ways that people cooperated and interacted: canals required water allocation and cleaning; terraces required clearing and structural maintenance; and fields required coordinated planting and harvesting, ritual propitiation, and pastoralism for fertilizer. Enclosures in the fields indicate that distinct groups oversaw ritual practices. In building this infrastructure, local people rejected the universalizing styles and rituals that characterized Chavín to establish a community focused on the coordinated activities of local corporate groups. The paper argues that infrastructure is not a mere reflection of broader political or social ideas, such as community. Rather, a community of human and non-human actors is created in the social interactions and practices through which people build, maintain, and care for essential and enduring material structures.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Technopolitics of Ancient Infrastructures

Keywords

Spatial Coverage