Pre-hispanic Building Stone Quarrying and Selection near Mt. Coropuna, Perú

Summary

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

Studies of Inka quarries have largely been restricted to the Cusco heartland, such that only a handful of quarries have generally served to describe Inka stoneworking technology, labor organization, and material selection as a whole. This bias has resulted in a dearth of understanding as to how Inka stoneworking varied over time and between geographical contexts. The study of quarrying in Inka provincial contexts stands to add nuance to our understanding of how Inka stoneworking technology developed in the heartland and the extent to which local knowledge might have influenced the construction process elsewhere. In 2017 we conducted an oriented survey within a 30-kilometer radius of Maucallacta, an Inka administrative center of the southern Cuntisuyo province, registering a total of 10 pre-Hispanic quarries. The technological repertoires present at these quarries overlap, but do not completely match, with those that have been described in the Inka heartland. These quarries do attest to a preference for dark-colored andesite that has likewise been noted in the heartland; in some cases this stone was transported over several kilometers to construction sites. In addition, we present our methodological approach to studying building stone quarries in the Andes in the hopes of advancing this sub-field further.

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): 23791