Resilience, Incursion, Incorporation: A Multi-Scalar Approach to the Temporality of Collapse in the South-Central Andes

Summary

Cross-cultural literature highlights the importance of differentiating between political, societal, and ‘cultural’ collapse. Focusing largely on the short-term aftermath of collapse, this scholarship demonstrates that even in the clearest examples of political fragmentation, considerable stability in other components of past societies is often archaeologically visible. Less attention has been paid to longer-term impacts and responses. Taking the disintegration of the Tiwanaku state in the south central Andes circa AD 1000 as an example, I consider the temporal scales involved in collapse. Focusing on a small village in the Moquegua Valley, Peru, on the periphery of the Tiwanaku polity, that was established as the state fragmented, I explore how this community and its neighbors were affected by and responded to socio-political upheaval over time. I suggest that as elsewhere, in the first few centuries after the overthrow of Tiwanaku political authority, many elements of social organization and cultural practice were maintained at the local level. Drawing on excavation data spanning approximately 500 years, I then turn to the longer term ramifications of Tiwanaku state collapse, and explore how the immediate choices made by the community made it vulnerable to outside incursion and ultimately contributed to ‘cultural collapse.’

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• "Let's Talk about [Collapse], Baby": Explorations in the Archaeology of Societal Collapse

Keywords

Spatial Coverage