The View from the North: Topará and Early Horizon Commoner Lifeways at Jahuay, Quebrada Topará, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From the Paracas Culture to the Inca Empire: Recent Archaeological Research in the Chincha Valley, Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Just north of the Chincha Valley, the village site Jahuay at the mouth of the Topará valley offers an opportunity to investigate non-elite lifeways, and specifically the Topará cultural tradition, in the Chincha region during the terminal Early Horizon Period (approximately 250-1 BCE). This paper presents new results from the 2018 Jahuay excavations, which expanded on 2017 excavations that sought to re-examine the site following Edward Lanning’s 1953 investigations that defined the Topará ceramic seriation. In this paper, we describe Topará cobblestone architecture and mortuary remains from Jahuay, and we discuss the abundant material evidence that these littoral villagers depended on both maritime and agricultural subsistence products. Finally, we consider the implications of Jahuay’s location between the Chincha and Cañete Valleys and seek to contextualize the site within what we understand about the Early Horizon sociopolitical landscape of the Chincha region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From the Paracas Culture to the Inca Empire: Recent Archaeological Research in the Chincha Valley, Peru   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25266