Political Economy in the Multicentric Sicán City, Peru

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.

Sicán political economy can be analyzed using the staple and wealth finance approach; in this talk I’ll focus on the latter. Interpretations about Sicán’s economy and exchange have been until now based mainly on the study of elite funerary contexts in the Sicán Core and ample craft production outside the city. In this talk, evidence of permanent residential patterns is presented, extending over a large area with a total of eight demographic districts, each with diverse craft production activities. I consider that craft production, particularly metallurgy, was the critical source of wealth, prestige, and power in the Sicán city and probably the Sicán polity. I propose that elites from District D acquired political and economic prestige during the Early Sicán period and they were the most powerful and prestigious group in the Sicán city during Middle Sicán. Lineages from District D crafted their symbols of power in metal objects, shrines, and ancestor tombs that became their means for political legitimization.

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): 36337.0