Rethinking Ecological Verticality for the Initial Period: A Case from South-Central Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Murra’s model of the vertical archipelago continues to reverberate in discussions of ecological exploitation across Andean regions, while other scholars have argued that such frameworks essentialize Andean societies by projecting ethnohistorical data onto the deep past. New ceramic, microbotanical, and isotopic evidence from Atalla and other sites in the Huancavelica region demonstrate a compelling case for the movement of peoples between this highland region and settlements on the Peruvian south coast. In this paper, we present evidence of interaction between the communities living in these disparate geographic regions to evaluate the utility of ecological verticality for understanding the sociopolitical landscape of south-central Peru during the late Initial period (1100-800 B.C.).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26023