Experiencing Monumentalism in the Late Archaic Cajamarca Highlands of Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Humble Houses to Magnificent Monuments: Papers in Honor of Jerry D. Moore" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A group of people came together in the early third millennium BCE to construct a large circular plaza bounded by concentric walls of free-standing megaliths. This Late Archaic period, 18 m diameter plaza is located near the summit of the site of Callacpuma in the Cajamarca Basin and has been the subject of mapping and excavation since 2018. This paper presents new radiocarbon dates for the initial construction of the plaza. This is the first plaza of its kind to be published from the northern highlands and may have been the focus of emerging systems of corporate identity in the region prior to the Early Huacaloma period. This paper will contextualize the construction and possible subsequent use of this space within our current understandings of life in the Late Archaic highlands as well as the broader circular plaza tradition that began at this time across much of the western central Andes. Following Moore’s groundbreaking work on proxemic and bodily experiences of monumental places, this paper seeks to illuminate the scale of lived corporate action in and around the Preceramic Callacpuma plaza.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Humble Houses to Magnificent Monuments: Papers in Honor of Jerry D. Moore

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36778.0