Legacies in the Landscape: Borderland Processes in the Upper Moche Valley of Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Frontier landscapes are complex and dynamic zones often comprising multiple cultural, economic, political, demographic, and geographic boundaries. Bradley J. Parker’s (2006) Borderland Matrix model endeavors towards a systematic and process-focused study of frontier landscapes and the bundles of boundaries that compose them. The present work builds off of this model with data from a full-coverage pedestrian survey of the Upper Moche Valley of Peru. Beginning as a geographic and demographic boundary between the highlands and coast, this region served nearly a millennium-long tenure as the eastern political boundary of the southern Moche political tradition (AD 200-900) and subsequently the Chimú Empire (AD 900-1470). From a settlement perspective, findings suggest that coastal people and polities were often bound together in both time and space on this frontier. Traces of Chimú political authority frequently echo or co-opt the physical legacies—monuments and settlements alike—left in the landscape by the Moche. These data are explored in comparison to Parker’s (2006) "Tigris Borderlands" case-study with a focus on process and differing trajectories of borderland creation and transformation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23717