A Bioarchaeological Approach to the Social Construction of Community Identities in Mountain Landscapes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Huarochirí Manuscript has made legendary the social relationships of pre-Columbian groups inhabiting the Andean mountain landscape that ascends steeply from the present-day coastal capital city of Lima, Peru, to the high-altitude Huarochirí Province. In this famous collection of ethnohistoric narratives, authored in the indigenous Quechua language, the group identities of the highland Checa storytellers and neighboring coastal Yunca populations are portrayed as antagonistic, yet simultaneously intricately intertwined. Archaeological investigations of these relationships, however, have focused extensively on locating a boundary between the two groups. The current paper demonstrates how a bioarchaeological approach that engages social theories of community formation and examines multiple social practices simultaneously can elucidate the complex nature of social interactions across mountain landscapes. Focusing on the middle Rimac Valley site of Rinconada Alta, where highland groups are reported to have replaced lowland groups, new mortuary contextual data are combined with previously published isotopic reconstructions of dietary and mobility practices and compared to those from the coastally located Armatambo site to shed light on community formation processes in this potentially contested area. Results suggest that mortuary rituals served as a means to reinforce social ties and promote solidarity among diverse community members.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24880