From Bedrock to Biface: An Examination of Wari Lithic Technology within the Moquegua Valley of Southern Peru

Summary

This research investigates lithic artifacts, and debitage recovered from Middle Horizon (A.D. 550 – 1000) households in the Moquegua Valley, Peru to assess models of Wari state expansion and polity interaction. While lithic technology, in the form of formal and informal flake tools, are present throughout complex societies, they are traditionally overlooked by archaeologists and result in few published studies. This study examines two Wari sites (Cerro Baul and Cerro Mejia) in the upper Moquegua Valley of southern Peru. The research presented expands upon our current limited knowledge of the lithic assemblage through the utilization of retouch analyses for formal chipped stone tools, as well as expediency indices to determine the overall curation, or tool use, of the lithic material. Gephi, a visual exploratory data analysis tool usually reserved for social network analysis, is incorporated into this analysis in order to define intra-site variations in lithic attributes among households and inter-site variations among the two sites.

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