The Religious Nature of Defended Sites: Chip's insights at Cerro Baul

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Chip has always been a big thinker about the capacity for violence in the human species and has pioneered ways of thinking about warfare in the Andean past that has revolutionized the field. He has also explored the roles of ritual and symbolism in his more recent work and his insights have influenced the ways the current generation of scholars is contemplating the roles of ritual, religion, and warfare in our world. I explore here the intersection of these phenomena at Cerro Baul, the Wari center on the Tiwanaku frontier, following on Chip’s advice three decades ago about how to think about this problem. Our excavations in the past few years have yielded new evidence on the nature of religious syncretism on the defended mountaintop citadel that suggests the ways in which religion and ritual intersect with warfare and defended settlements in the Andean Middle Horizon. We explore especially how a Tiwanaku temple was established within the Wari fortress and reflect on the recent evidence for how that temple was provisioned with ritual ceramics, obsidian, and exotic offerings. In so doing, we examine the nature of ritual in defended sites in the Andean world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35667.0