Territoriality and ceramic distribution of the Virú-Gallinazo populations on the northern coast of Peru: new insights using spatial analysis

Summary

Since the Virú Project, the use of Castillo Decorated as the principal chrono-cultural element to characterize the Virú-Gallinazo presence laid to a “Gallinazo illusion“. Unfortunately, it appears that our knowledge about the Virú-Gallinazo populations are still limited, and most of the time we define them through the prism of the Mochicas. In order to understand who these groups were, we analyzed the spatial distribution of the following ceramics styles trough the northern coast using GIS: Negative (Gallinazo and Carmelo Negative), Castillo Decorated and Gallinazo White-Red-Orange. These styles compose the Virú-Gallinazo complex as it was defined by Bennett, Ford and all the member of the Virú project. We registered 476 sites between the Piura and Huarmey valleys. These data allow us to present in this paper the principal results of an intra-site, regional and macro-regional analyses. With this research, we identified three patterns of site distributions at the regional scale, and specific associations between the ceramic styles and their relation with mochica’s artefacts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Everybody Else: The Predecessors and Contemporaries of the Moche on the North Coast of Peru

Keywords

Spatial Coverage