Crafting Community: A Multi-site Analysis of Craft Production and Exchange in the Aftermath of State Collapse

Summary

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

Techniques derived from analytical chemistry are critical to examining the impact of macro political change on the production and circulation of craft goods in the past. LA-ICP-MS analyses of objects and the raw materials used in their manufacture in the Moquegua Valley of southern Peru have been directed at reconstructing patterns of production and exchange in a region subject to episodes of conquest and colonialism over 1500 years. To date, analyses addressing production and exchange in the wake of state disintegration have been limited to one site, Tumilaca la Chimba, established circa AD 1000 as the Tiwanaku state’s authority faltered in Moquegua. Complementing that preliminary work, which suggests that this post-collapse community both engaged in altered long-distance economic networks and continued to draw on pre-collapse knowledge about resource procurement, I present compositional data generated through LA-ICP-MS analyses of 80 ceramics derived from an additional four contemporaneous, post-collapse sites in the Moquegua Valley. I draw on those results to examine a) the extent to which different communities participated in shared or distinct patterns of long-distance exchange, 2) whether and in what ways different communities made varied choices about resource procurement, and 3) the organization of ceramic manufacture within each community.

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): 24828