The Landscapes of Huarochirí (Peru) in Written Historical and Oral Traditions

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Personified landscapes—comprising or populated by animate beings (tirakuna, earth beings, huacas, apus)—feature centrally in discussions of the archaeological, historical, and ethnographic records of Andean societies. Because of its unique seventeenth-century Quechua manuscript, this tendency has been particularly influential in Huarochirí, Peru. The manuscript’s narratives are vitalized by the adventures and personalities of a host of regional huacas, superhuman entities localized in and generative of the narrators’ landscape. Here, we present recent ethnographic data from present-day oral traditions in Huarochirí that provide depictions of a landscape that is less anthropomorphized yet no less animate than the historical examples. While the ethnographic landscape is not constituted by defined superhuman persons, local populations do attribute agency to the landscape, allowing it to interact with them and guide their activities. We consider the implications of these different expressions of Andean landscapes for the ways archaeologists approach the perception of sites of cultural significance, and the production of place more broadly.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33216