The view from above: changing experiences of the built environment during the Andean Late Intermediate Period

Summary

The highland Andes underwent major transformations in settlement organization between AD1000-1300, in the first half of the Late Intermediate Period. Settlement patterning shifted to higher altitudes, and in some areas, new sites were accompanied by defensive features. Most research has focused on the structural pressures that led to these changes, such as an increase of violence in the wake of Middle Horizon polity collapse, or a shift to pastoralism as a result of climate change. This paper focuses instead on how these changes in the built environment were experienced after their construction. Settlements in many regions shared newly developed attributes such as stone masonry, freestanding domestic architecture, and communal ritual spaces that were relatively small in scale and often ancestor-focused. Focusing on architectural changes developed in the Chachapoyas region during this time, I suggest that these new built environments generated fundamentally different forms of habitus for their residents and radically altered the relationships that communities sustained with each other and with the powers that inhabited the landscape. Stone-built, mountaintop villages of the LIP may have originated as adaptive responses, but their spatial and material attributes also shaped new understandings of their inhabitants’ place in society and in the animate cosmos.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Powerful Places in the Ancient Andes

Keywords

Spatial Coverage