From Discrete Frontiers to Cross-Cutting Religious Networks: Religious Monuments and Cultural Syncretism in the Peruvian North Coast and Highland, Ninth to Eleventh Centuries AD

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Them and Us: Transmission and Cultural Dynamism in the North of Peru between AD 250 and 950: A Vision since the Recent Northern Investigations" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Colonialist perspectives of territorial expansion envision the political entities as spatially defined by discrete frontier boundaries. Under this approach, the distribution of objects a given cultural style parallels the area of influence of the groups that produced such style. This approach, however, fails to account the dissemination of intangible expressions of culture. In this paper, I seek to reposition the role of religion in the debates of cultural change, syncretism, and ethnic symbiosis in Andean archaeology. By drawing on my own research in San José de Moro and its monumental landscape, I look to further investigate the relationships between the built landscape, religion, and cultural identity in the Peruvian northern region during the ninth to eleventh centuries AD. Particular and recurrent features in religious monumental buildings, from both the Peruvian north coast and highland, suggests that coastal and highland societies were interlinked not only through trade networks and political affinity, but also shared religious worldviews and death ideologies, which can be better understood as cross-cultural religious networks.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Them and Us: Transmission and Cultural Dynamism in the North of Peru between AD 250 and 950: A Vision since the Recent Northern Investigations   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33463