A Tale of Two Styles: A Geoarchaeological Investigation into Lima & Ychsma Construction Materials at Cajamarquilla, Peru

Summary

This paper examines construction materials from Cajamarquilla, one of the largest prehistoric urban sites on the Central Coast of Peru. Little work has been published about the architecture at Cajamarquilla, other than to comment on the enormity of the site and its constructions. Rammed earth (tapia, in Spanish) is the main construction style at Cajamarquilla, but with marked observable differences between the Lima Phase (AD500 – 800) and Ychsma Phase (AD1100 – 1450) occupations. Lima walls were built using large, uniform courses of tapia and appear to be tempered with small pebbles and seem homogeneous, whereas Ychsma walls were built with small, uneven courses of tapia and tempering materials used were much less uniform in size and included organic materials. The level of socio-political complexity is unclear for these cultures, especially the Lima culture, which created massive, well planned construction projects but lacked a regional system of ranked settlements usually seen in a state level society. This study aims to characterize the raw materials and preparation methods using bulk and thin section analyses in order to determine relative labor investment for construction materials to provide additional evidence for different technological and social conditions that prevailed during Lima and Ychsma occupations.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage