Partnering for Power: Castillo de Huarmey Relations with the Wari

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Decade of Multidisciplinary Research at Castillo de Huarmey, Peru" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

By Middle Horizon Epoch 2 (AD 800–850) the Wari polity was a generation old and assumed to reflect a complex hegemony based on ruins of a cosmopolitan capital in the Ayacucho-Huanta valley and artifact associations among ethnically distinct communities throughout the Andes. The complexity includes shared artistic expression in pottery styles as well as installations of dominance such as Pikillacta and incursions such as Jincamocco’s changed settlement patterns. Castillo de Huarmey’s remains exemplify a complex relationship within Wari hegemony. One means of studying this relationship is presented through comparing pastes of two ceramic samples using instrumental neutron activation analysis. One sample from Wari’s heartland came from two university collections: (1) 103 sherds from the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, were submitted to the University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR); (2) 119 sherds from Phoebe A. Hearst Museum, UC-Berkeley to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The second sample was 77 sherds from Castillo de Huarmey that were submitted to MURR. Michael Glascock and Brandi MacDonald completed the MURR analyses in 2017–2018. Frank Asaro, Helen Michel, and Elizabeth Holtzman completed the LBNL analysis in 1977. Results suggest that Wari initiated contact and supplemented a relationship that strengthened Huarmey’s authority.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Decade of Multidisciplinary Research at Castillo de Huarmey, Peru   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36651.0