Ritual Hearth Structures at the Casma Valley Site of Huerequeque: Making a Case for Highland/Coastal Interaction in Initial Period (2100-1000 BCE) Peru

Summary

Recent excavations at the site of Huerequeque, some 24 km inland at an altitude of 450 m, exposed several large and elaborate hearths, including three ventilated examples. While hearths for cooking and warmth are very common within residential architecture at Huerequeque, these special hearths are consistently associated with non-domestic architecture. One example occupies the center of an intermediate-sized mound structure adjacent to the main platform mound at the site where it served as a likely focal point for congregation, feasting, and ritual by selected individuals. Among the other examples, one is especially reminiscent of highland-style Mito hearths, suggesting that Huerequeque's mid-valley location facilitated communication between the highlands and the lower-valley sites of the Sechin Alto Polity which likely established and controlled Huerequeque as an outpost. Insights gained from the study of special hearths at Huerequeque also help us to understand the presence and seemingly late occurrence of ventilated hearth structures at down-valley sites and coastal sites during the Initial Period.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage