Scale, Interaction, and Society: Constituting Social Boundaries in the Northern Peruvian Andes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists often look to certain practices, such as interregional trade, local feasting, or inter-community warfare, as having defined different kinds of social boundaries—between corporate groups, communities, polities, ethnicities, or regions. Tom Dillehay’s interdisciplinary work on a variety of Andean societies, from Chile to Peru, reveals how studies that consider interaction at multiple scales expose a more complex picture, such as how specific practices can define multiple social boundaries and identities simultaneously or how interaction involves negotiation between diverse social actors in multiple contexts. In this paper, we draw from Tom Dillehay’s work to examine the materials, practices, and scales of interaction that constituted social boundaries in two Andean case studies: Wimba, a settlement in the ceja de montaña of Amazonas, Peru (1000–1532 CE) and Hualcayán, a highland community in the Cordillera Blanca of Ancash, Peru (2400 BCE–1450 CE). At Wimba, gatherings involved ceramics and portable adornments that indexed porous social boundaries with lowland Amazonian groups. At Hualcayán, materials originating from multiple scales of trade, agriculture, and ritual reflect the ways inhabitants’ practices connected them to the wider Recuay world while also maintaining autonomy. Together, these case studies reveal how multiscalar interaction connected community practices to larger regional processes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37397.0