Landscape and Labor: Bones and Bodies of the Tiwanaku State

Summary

Modern, archaeological, and bioarchaeological accounts of South American Andean workers show labor divisions by age, then gender, with a focus on duality between the sexes. Within the Tiwanaku state (AD 500-1100) of Bolivia and Peru, labor was also divided across the landscape within its heartland and colonies, and especially within its multiethnic neighborhoods in the heartland city of Tiwanaku (Becker 2017). Pondering these labor communities further with a focus on data from these peoples’ skeletal remains, this paper discusses the embodied physical changes noted on these Tiwanaku bones associated with varied task and subsistence-based lifeways. While it may not be possible to link certain jobs with each individual, locating gendered spaces and tasks may be conceivable spatially within the population. Further features may also be identified by focusing on certain parts of the anatomy, like hands, feet, and the spine, which would have been important body regions to show labor distinctions associated known Andean crafts like potting, weaving, and the movement of goods using backpacks across the highly variable elevations of this state. Hence, this research takes a wide-to-narrow scope across the Tiwanaku polity to understand labor, gendered activity spaces, and embodiment on human bone.

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): 21186