Obsidian in the Wari Empire: sourcing material from the capital using pXRF

Summary

This paper examines the procurement and consumption of obsidian within the Wari capital (AD 600 – 1000) in the Ayacucho highlands of Peru. During the Middle Horizon, the Wari Empire expanded and controlled much of the Peruvian Andes, largely through the import, export and regulation of critical resources extracted from subject territories and populations. This project hypothesizes that obsidian may have operated as one such critical resource for imperial control and seeks to examine this hypothesis at the imperial capital of Huari. As part of ongoing dissertation research, analysis was conducted on obsidian collections of varying contexts deriving from the site of Huari, using x-ray fluorescence to determine the source location for each of the samples to explore varying temporal and spatial patterns of consumption of obsidian by imperial populations as well as the relationships between the capital and the hinterland regions from which the obsidian was extracted.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16583