Societal Boundaries and Material Production: Stylistic and Spatial Analyses of Ceramics from Late Intermediate Sites in the Huamanga Province of Peru

Summary

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

Social actors interact with their material environment rather than simply reacting to it; they manipulate the meanings of, or meaningfully constitute, material culture according to their own needs and interests. As such, people use material culture to communicate and negotiate self-identity, as well as group affiliation and dissociation, and leaders can negotiate their social powers through the control of technical knowledge. The focus of this research is the dialectic relationship between society and ceramics—understanding ceramics to understand sociopolitical organization. This paper presents the final results of stylistic and spatial analyses carried out on ceramic fragments systematically recovered from fourteen Late Intermediate Period (LIP) (AD 1000-1450) sites in the Huamanga Province of Ayacucho, Peru. Many scholars suggest this period was marked by an initial pattern of sociopolitical decentralization followed by a period of substantial population growth and increased sociopolitical coordination in pursuit of common defense. To begin testing this interpretation, this paper evaluates the standardization and spatial patterning of pre-LIP, LIP, and post-LIP ceramic styles at the local (or site) and regional level to identify potential intrasocietal and intersocietal boundaries and define the mode(s) of ceramic production.

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): 36972.0