Andean Philosophies, Social Theory, and the Use of Analogies in the Interpretation of Andean Built Environments

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.

Dr. Tom Dillehay has significantly advanced Andean studies and archaeological theory and method, and a short presentation could never do justice to the extraordinary breadth of Tom’s many contributions. In my paper, I focus on Tom’s invaluable investigations of Andean ideologies of space and his pioneering use of ethnographic analogies to interpret the meaning and ontological status of built environments in ancient South America. I mobilize architectural data from the Jequetepeque Valley of northern Peru, where I have long conducted research and was first introduced to the region by Tom and his co-director Alan Kolata. I comparatively examine how ceremonial constructions in the Cañoncillo region in southern Jequetepeque encoded ideologies of social and cosmic dualism. I explore in turn how specific monuments were engaged as animate and powerful persons. However, my comparison demonstrates that Andean worldviews recorded ethnographically do not find direct equivalence in the material traces of our analysis. Instead, I make use of analogical reasoning to identify important historical differences through time, as my survey of the ceremonial centers of Jatanca, Huaca Colorada, and Tecapa intends to demonstrate. An interpretive framework inspired by Tom, our research strives to bring social theory into dialogue with Andean philosophies and cosmologies.

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

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35807.0