Ritual Cycles and Organizational Plasticity in the Post-collapse Colla Society of Southern Peru (A.D. 1000-1450)

Summary

As Wengrow and Graeber (2015) recently pointed out, since the 1960s anthropologists have focused on organization types—bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states and the like—that remain relatively stable over long periods of time. By contrast, this paper considers evidence from the post-collapse Colla polity of southern Peru to understand how negative perceptions of centralized authority that culminated in the collapse of the Tiwanaku state (c. A.D. 1000) both demanded, and provided the impetus for, the emergence of new forms of political leadership that were designed to be assembled and disassembled according to the cyclical nature of ritual and political events. Architectural, faunal, and ceramic data drawn from the Colla necropolis of Sillustani and outlaying domestic sites suggest that such a self-conscious organizational strategy—deliberately alternating between periods of hierarchy and equality—prevented the persistence and reemergence of centralized political authority in the aftermath of Tiwanaku’s demise.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage