Communities of Practice and Ancient Andean Houses

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Communities of Practice in the Ancient Andes: Thinking through Knowledge Transmission and Community Making in and beyond Craft Production" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Comparative ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological case studies of house construction demonstrate the significance of communities of practice in the construction and maintenance of houses in the Andes. Key phases of house construction and maintenance similarly draw on communities of practice that extend beyond the residence group. Except for some of the earliest houses known from the Andes, essentially every Andean house requires more labor than the residence group can provide, at least at some specific phase (e.g., framing or acquiring roofing materials, etc.). This necessarily draws on a community of practice, which is significant because many prehispanic and contemporary settlement patterns are characterized by dispersed homesteads. Therefore, communities of practice based on house building and maintenance can be major integrative social networks, often paralleled by other forms of mutual aid or ritual obligations. Yet those communities of practice will not be identical for various reasons, specifically because different types of domestic architecture engage with distinct materials, building methods, and trajectories of use, remodeling, abandonment, and recycling. I argue that archaeologists should realize that the specific domestic architecture they are excavating was the creation by not only its inhabitants but this larger social field represented by communities of practice.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Communities of Practice in the Ancient Andes: Thinking through Knowledge Transmission and Community Making in and beyond Craft Production   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32479