Cerro Mejía: A Wari Community Divided?

Summary

The Wari-affiliated community on Cerro Mejía is divided by large walls that cut the slopes into vertical strips. These segments of the site may represent divisions of the settlement that the occupants recognized, agreed with, and maintained or these groupings may have been imposed by Wari officials. In this paper, I describe the features of Cerro Mejía and consider this important question. In light of overt differences between houses with regards to form and construction techniques I suggest that barrio walls divided colonists from different regions, who arrived sometime in the seventh or eighth century CE. Also, despite several generations of co-occupation at Cerro Mejía it appears some elements of quotidian life were maintained as distinctive between these groups when the site was abandoned and smaller communities were founded in the early Late Intermediate Period (ca. 1250 CE).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20124