Radiocarbon Dates from the Necropolis of Ancón, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Necropolis of Ancón, Peru represents one of the largest pre-contact cemeteries in the Andes, with more than 3,000 burials and tens of thousands of associated grave goods excavated from the site. Despite more than a century of archaeological research at the Necropolis, not a single C-14 date from the burial ground has ever been published. In this paper, we present the first radiocarbon data from the Necropolis. Thirteen samples from eight Ancón funerary contexts were collected from the Field Museum of Chicago’s Ancón collection and submitted to DirectAMS for radiocarbon analysis. Radiocarbon results suggest that Ancón was most heavily utilized as a cemetery during the tail end of the Middle Horizon (MH) and in the Late Intermediate Period (LIP), raising questions about Ancón’s role during the earlier half of the Middle Horizon. The new dates provide a refined sense of the timing and nature of human activity at Ancón and contribute to a broader understanding of chronology and mortuary traditions during the latter half of the MH and LIP along Peru’s central coast. This presentation may contain images of human remains.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36456.0