Signs of History, Signs in History: Confronting the Past in Antiquity in the Jequetepeque Valley, Peru

Summary

As architectural interventions on the landscape, structures considered to have ceremonial or ritual significance provide a means to regulate the temporalization of practice in material form. As built objects, monumental huaca structures in the Andes served to mark the longue dureé, as their existence mediated and legitimized political order linked to the deep cosmological history framing mythic time, ordering the present and planning for the future. As physical and subjectified artifacts embedded in the landscape, ceremonial loci were the conceptual stages on which temporality was created, preserved, and continually reaffirmed. Located only a few hundred metres apart in the Southern Jequetepeque Valley Peru, the Formative site of Jatanca and the Late Moche site of Huaca Colorada represent two occupations separated by 500 years of abandonment. Although temporally distinct and archaeologically separated as two discontinuous communities within a shared landscape, excavations of both sites have suggested that the ceremonial structures of the later Moche occupation were strongly influenced by the presence of the architectural remains of the Formative period community. This paper will trace how specific spatial and ideological concepts stretched across time between these two communities and how their situation in the landscape mediated the construction of identity and personhood.

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): 20723