The Messy East: Regional Models and Their Complications in the Chachapoyas Area of Peru

Summary

The Chachapoyas area has long been considered an internally coherent archaeological and sociohistorical region, one of the few associated with the Eastern Andes. Recent research, however, reveals significant environmental and cultural diversity and calls into question whether "Chachapoyas" can meaningfully be understood as a single region. There is little evidence for any practices that both unified it internally while distinguishing it from others, and ongoing research at the site complex of Tambillo in comparison with other areas of Chachapoyas indicates that the most productive approach at this stage is to focus on characterizing social and cultural patterns at the local level. Determining how, or whether, higher-order sociocultural units were constituted at the regional level requires greater bodies of data than those currently available. In this situation, it is both analytically productive and potentially more accurate to understand all interactions as inter-regional, even among groups that were once considered to belong to the same "region." Similar geographical and environmental conditions found in many parts of the Eastern Andes suggest that it is important to more broadly evaluate the importance of scale and landscape in characterizing inter-group interactions, and to reconsider models developed from coastal and highland contexts.

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): 20173