Interlinking Practices and Community Assemblages: Agriculture and ritual in ancient Hualcayán, Peru

Summary

This paper combines assemblage theory with ritual economy in the study of long-term community formation at prehistoric Hualcayán, in highland Ancash, Peru. In particular, it explores how the people of Hualcayán interlinked and coordinated their practices of building, food production, and ritual consumption to assemble a Recuay community during the Andean Early Intermediate Period (AD 1–700). It traces the archaeological evidence of how religious ideologies, social group divisions, and agricultural technologies shifted together during this process of community formation, including how ritual and food production practices and materials were integrated into particular events and local spaces. It concludes that the integration of these practices was essential to establishing common goals, consent, and material dependencies between a community of builders, ritual participants, and food producers. Ultimately, the paper argues that to examine community is to inquire into the overlapping ritual and labor practices that constitute social interaction and create meaningful relationships between people and non-human actors such as land, plants, animals, and supra-human beings.

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): 22528