Preliminary Results of an Integrated Approach for the Study of Ceramic Vessels of Fishing Communities in Prehispanic Huanchaco, North Coast of Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Andean and Amazonian Ceramics: Advances in Technological Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeology of Peru has been dominated by the study of ceramics through the lenses of culture-history approach, which emphasize form, decoration, and style. These variables were successfully applied to identify archaeological cultures and chronological periods. Subsequently, this approach helped to organize the configuration of the prehispanic territory and its sociocultural development. In this paper, I present a multidisciplinary study on complete and incomplete ceramic vessels found on various residential settlements of the Huanchaco coast, covering a chronological sequence between 1500 BC and cal AD 850. I use a classic morphological and decoration analysis, followed by technological, petrographic, and preliminary XRF studies. These studies are complemented with residue analysis (microbotanical remains). This approach raises questions on context, how the vessels were used, and what kind of food could have been prepared and eaten. The second set of questions is oriented toward understanding the production sphere, its provenience, and the intrinsic ideological factors embedded in ceramic vessels. Finally, using absolute dating from the contemporary archaeological context, I compare form and style to evaluate whether it is valid or not the correlation of the traditional cultural history approach for the construction of relative chronologies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Andean and Amazonian Ceramics: Advances in Technological Studies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35796.0