Past and Present Andean Night Moon Rituals

Summary

Two nighttime rituals, one archaeological and the other ethnographic, are presented for the Andean region of South America. The archaeological case is the 7500-4000 year old littoral mound site of Huaca Prieta on the north coast of Peru where a very dense accumulation of charcoal resulting from fires and rituals formed the site. Recovered at the site were reed torches suggesting nighttime rituals. Today, shamans or curanderos from the north coast still occasionally use the site at night under a clear moon to make coca offerings (pages) and to pray for productive fertility from the sea and the land. The ethnographic case is the Mapuche shamans or machis of south-central Chile who perform nighttime rituals to communicate with the gods and ancestors. The wider political and community and interactive implications of these two cases, set within the Andean world and within broader anthropological concepts, are discussed and compared.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Archaeology of the Night

Keywords

Spatial Coverage