Memories of Disaster and Monumental Places in the Callejon de Huaylas, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1970, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake destroyed numerous towns and displaced many families throughout the Callejon de Huaylas, Peru. In the search for new land and new lives, many of the displaced families began to settle on elevated archaeological sites of monumental architecture located in alluvial plains and near urban centers throughout the region. Despite the active and dynamic landscape of the Callejon de Huaylas, fraught with landslides, earthquakes, and glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFS), these monumental places currently occupied by present-day communities have existed as enduring and continually occupied places on the landscape since the third millennium BCE. This paper combines preliminary paleoclimate and geoarchaeological data to situate the emergence and vitality of early Andean highland monuments (3000–2100 BCE) in an ecological environment that is constantly transforming through time. Combined with this analysis, oral history and ethnohistoric data create relevant links between present-day understandings of environmental risk, monumentality, and place making and the archaeological past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37232.0