A Tale of Two Cities?: Neighborhood Identity and Integration at Ventanillas

Summary

Studies of Andean urbanism have often focused on contrasts: between elite and lower-class compounds or neighborhoods, between rural and urban communities, or between the "true" cities in regions like Mesopotamia and the "special case" of the Andes. Recent work at Ventanillas, a large Late Intermediate Period site in the middle Jequetepeque Valley at the frontier of coastal Lambayeque and Chimú polities, was initially designed to contrast what were presumed to be an elite coastal residential neighborhood and lower-class, possibly highland, hillside terraces. However, 2016 excavations on the terraces failed to confirm this easy assumption, and have complicated our view of who lived at Ventanillas. This paper compares subsistence remains, ceramics, and other artifacts across neighborhoods at Ventanillas, with the goal of elucidating similarities and differences between sectors, and, more importantly, exploring the extent to which residents living in different parts of the site participated in a shared cuisine, specialized in different economic activities, and expressed wealth and ethnic or cultural identities. We ultimately hope to speak to the ways in which Ventanillas neighborhoods were (and were not) socially and economically integrated at the community level and in the context of valley processes of social and political change.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 18775