How to Make a Proper Bundle: Ritual Knowledge Transfer and Mortuary Communities of Practice in the Tiwanaku Diaspora

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.

The concept Community of Practice (CoP) has found surprisingly limited application in archaeology beyond craft production, yet it also lends itself to examining the situated learning of ritual practices. Rituals require strict adherence to actions and knowledge systems that are guarded by specialists and that involve places and actors from (super)natural realms and across multiple temporal and spatial dimensions. In particular, mortuary rituals comprise the “production” of funerary bundles and burials—objects and places where artifacts and human bodies become wrapped up in emotions and memories. Here, I examine diasporic Tiwanaku funerary practices at the provincial center of Omo M10, Moquegua, Peru, (AD 700–1150) through the lens of mortuary Communities of Practice. I argue that the preparation of funerary bundles and their interment provided arenas of situated learning in which mourners acquired knowledge of proper funerary procedures. A close analysis of funerary processes and their variability across discrete cemeteries reveals the tensions between the intimacy and immediacy of bundle preparation and burial, and the social demands of diasporic life and identity maintenance. I propose that burial offerings and cemeteries acted as boundary objects and places in articulating different temporal, spatial, and spiritual realms.

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): 32493