Cosmopolitics and Community Reformation in Middle Horizon Jequetepeque

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A New Horizon: Reassessing the Andean Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000) and Rethinking the Andean State" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In his analysis of Shang authority structures, Campbell attacks the search for ancient states in the archaeological record as founded on “an illusory and anachronistic projection of modern political contingencies” (2009:821). Indeed, a narrow focus on rational leadership strategies or the application of rigid trait lists distort the historical realities of Andean political institutions and how they variably articulated with diverse social fields (sensu Bourdieu), whether families, lineage confederacies, cults, wak’as, or artisans, etc. In this paper, I examine how distinct social networks, especially emerging corporations of craft specialists, contributed to the cosmopolitanism, intensified social interactions, and religious transformations characteristic of the Late Moche period in the Jequetepeque Valley. In the end, I argue that centralized institutions did not simply impose the socio-physical spaces, technologies, and ideologies that commonly define the Middle Horizon. Instead, they were in large part (re)made and sustained by local communities and the material corpora they produced and consumed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• A New Horizon: Reassessing the Andean Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000) and Rethinking the Andean State

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32368