Comparative characterization and sourcing of pottery styles from the Lurin valley, central coast of Peru

Summary

Our goal is to reconstruct networks of ceramic production and exchange on the Peruvian central coast through a comparison of compositional datasets on pottery and soil samples from the Lurin valley. While one dataset from Villa El Salvador dates to the late Early Horizon, most of the pottery sample comes from Late Horizon occupations at the Pachacamac, Pueblo Viejo, and Huaycan de Cieneguilla sites. In Tawantinsuyu, the products and networks of exchange connected heterogeneous populations, and thus the identities of producers, traders, or builders of public and domestic spaces did not coincide. Imperial ideology materialized in official architecture and paraphernalia, but not always in the vernacular versions. For pottery, producers followed local and regional styles and technologies, possessed their own clay sources, standards for temper selection and inclusion, and recipes for pigments, to produce both local and imperial styles. To what extent then did Inka control affect the technological choices of these local potters, especially for reproducing imperial forms and decorations? Our research focuses on the effect of Inca subjugation on Central Coast pottery production by comparing compositional groups and contrasting them with clay sources to reconstruct the networks of pottery production and exchange.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Ceramics of the Indigenous Peoples of South America: Studies of Production and Exchange using INAA

Keywords

Spatial Coverage