Local and Imperial Powers at the Huancabamba Depression: The Alto Piura Case

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Political Economies on the Andean Coast" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The peoples of the inner Piuran coast have a deep link with water management and agriculture that was consolidated around AD 1000 under the administration of local and foreign groups which densely occupied the Alto Piura (chaupiyunga) through administrative centers and irrigation systems. Using aerial photographs and RPA imagery, this research proposes an architectural typology and sequence to understand the regional sociopolitical process. The natural corridor formed by the Piura River was gradually transformed into a pivotal cultural landscape for interactions and exchange of goods between coastal polities within the Huancabamba Depression. The Sicán and Chimú centers at Pabur Viejo and El Ala suggest that these entities exerted control over the left margin of the Piura River, while later the Inca and the Spanish empires occupied the right margin. In parallel, processes of centralization and ethnogenesis during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries transformed local economy and regional exchange dynamics. The Alto Piura transformed from a diversely managed territory under the coexistence of local and other coastal entities (Sicán and Chimú), into an imperial province controlled by the Inca center of Piura (La Vieja). Lastly, during the early Spanish occupation this center prevailed and dominated all the Huancabamba Depression.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Political Economies on the Andean Coast   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37454.0