The House that Built Me: local and non-local among the Lurin Yauyos during the Inka Empire

Summary

Most scholarship on the shifts in local lifeways during the Late Horizon strictly focused on changes in the availability to new and limited-access goods by local elites (D’Altroy 2001; Hastorf 1990; 2003). In these models, local leaders became immersed in reciprocal and status-granting relationships with the Inka through gifts and exclusive artifacts. Materiality played a pivotal role in the relationship between the Inka and their subjects. However, it is less clear how local ethnicity was shaped by materiality during this period. Recent scholarship demonstrates that the Inka reorganized local groups into new ethnic identities that better suited the ideal of unified provinces brought together into a cohesive imperial structure (Ogburn 2013). Even though the incorporation of smaller polities into Tawantinsuyu broadened local networks, local goods and technologies remained central to daily life. In this presentation, we question how ethnicity was formed, maintained and expanded through materiality among the Lurin Yauyos of Huarochirí. Through excavations in two households in the site of Ampugasa, and building primarily on architectural, ceramic, and zooarchaeological information, we argue that while the Inka fostered a Lurin Yauyos ethnic identity, it remained defined from the ground-up by the internal sociocultural mechanisms existing among the Yauyos groups.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Status and Identity in the Imperial Andes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14865