The Legacy of Early Fire Rituals: The Social and Spatial Prominence of Hearths after Kotosh at Hualcayán, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Illuminated Communities: The Role of the Hearth at the Beginning of Andean Civilization" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Scholars have long considered how the use of ritual hearths in early Andean temples, specifically those part of the Kotosh Religious Tradition, was central to early complex social practices in highland Peru. But what is the legacy of hearths as ritual spaces, objects, and tools for the transformation of materials in places where Kotosh was eventually rejected and replaced? To explore this question, this paper examines hearth rituals at Hualcayán (Ancash, Peru) spanning 1800–1 BC. Hualcayán’s early temple was a mound featuring Mito-style Kotosh enclosures where burning was an intimate rite visible only to people gathered within. By 1200 BC, people covered their last Kotosh enclosure and later burned fires in exclusive performances atop a small prominent platform—a practice that endured in the same location between 900 BC and at least AD 200, or during and after Chavín’s religious influence. Fire also became important to other Chavín-era ritual activities, such as to produce ash for interring children in the mound. Thus, although hearth ceremonies changed drastically, fire maintained ritual prominence. This paper reviews these ritual and spatial patterns of burning at Hualcayán in order to reconsider the centrality of ceremonial hearths after Kotosh during Central Andean Formative Period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Illuminated Communities: The Role of the Hearth at the Beginning of Andean Civilization   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25055