“Paria Caca Loves Him": The Camelid and Huarochirí Sustenance and Ceremony

Summary

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

Camelids, especially llamas, feature prominently in the myths, history, and descriptions of ceremony that constitute the seventeenth-century Quechua manuscript of Huarochirí. In this text they augur catastrophe (vocally and through readings of their insides); they were the focus of annual gatherings of flocks, families, and fertility charms; they were offered in sacrifice and raced in rituals to increase their abundance and the wealth of their owners. In this paper we combine these textual data with new faunal data from excavations at the Huarochirí manuscript’s ceremonial center of Llacsatambo (Peru), and recent discoveries of sites likely associated with the camelid-centered rituals described in the manuscript. This multidisciplinary portrait of the interactions of the late prehispanic peoples of Huarochirí and their camelids reveals information about breeding and pastoralism, consumption patterns of camelid meat and bone tools, and the range of quotidian and ceremonial space inhabited by camelids around Llacsatambo.

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): 33342