Partnering with Pots: The Work of Materials in the Imperial Inca Project

Summary

New understandings of matter and materiality are being driven by recent theoretical developments in the realm of science, particularly physics and ecology. These evolving orientations are, in turn, contributing to new philosophical thinking on the nature of being and reality. The trickle-down effects of these developments are, in part, responsible for what has been termed “the ontological turn,” a trend that is clearly visible in recent archaeological discourse. The new materialist ontology, in combination with relational and symmetrical approaches to analyzing the social, open the door for imagining ontologies different from our own. Focusing on the kinds of world-making and world-sustaining practices potentially discernible in the archaeological record may point us in the direction of alternative ontologies. In this paper, I work from the basis of the imperial Inca ceramic assemblage to consider whether and how such material entities may have been deployed in the task of empire-building and what insights they may provide into native Andean ontology during the late pre-Columbian period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Andean Ontologies: New Perspectives from Archaeology, Ethnohistory and Bioarchaeology

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