Feasting and Ritual Reuse: Analysis of the Faunal Assemblage from Huaca Soto, Chincha, Peru
Author(s): Jo Osborn; Benjamin Nigra
Year: 2016
Summary
Huaca Soto, a monumental Paracas platform mound in the Chincha Valley, experienced centuries of post-Formative reuse that continued well into the Inca Period. Two seasons of extensive excavation have yielded a massive assemblage of feasting debris within the mound’s uppermost sunken court dating to the mid-first millennium CE. Communal feasting in the ancient Andes is widely acknowledged to have been both a ritually and politically charged practice, and ongoing research examining the ritual reuse of Huaca Soto includes zooarchaeological analyses of feasting remains. This faunal assemblage highlights the array of activities that may have been incorporated into feasting events, and provides evidence of animal sacrifice, divination, and food consumption. These behaviors at Huaca Soto are consistent with ethnographic and ethnohistoric data in the region, and highlight the complex practice of ritual reuse of mounds on Peru’s South Coast.
Cite this Record
Feasting and Ritual Reuse: Analysis of the Faunal Assemblage from Huaca Soto, Chincha, Peru. Jo Osborn, Benjamin Nigra. Presented at The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Orlando, Florida. 2016 ( tDAR id: 404928)
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Keywords
General
Feasting
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Peruvian South Coast
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Zooarchaeology
Geographic Keywords
South America
Spatial Coverage
min long: -93.691; min lat: -56.945 ; max long: -31.113; max lat: 18.48 ;