Real Roads and Imaginary Borders: Exploring Northern and Central Andean Cultural Trajectories and Interactions from the Perspective of the Ceja de Selva during the First Millenium BCE

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cuando los senderos divergen: Reconsiderando las interacciones entre los Andes Septentrionales y los Andes Centrales durante el 1ro y 2do milenio AEC / When Paths Diverge: Reconsidering Interactions between the Northern and Central Andes, First–Second Millennium BCE" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The border between Peru and Ecuador has often been viewed heuristically as a boundary between the cultures of the Northern and Central Andes, particularly by the second of half of the first millennium BCE when the historical trajectory of the two culture areas appears to diverge into two separate paths. Nevertheless, recent research from the ceja de selva of the eastern half of the Transitional Zone between the Northern and Central Andes indicates a considerably more complicated picture, one that is suggestive of both shifting cultural boundaries as well as continued cultural interactions. In this paper, I use recent evidence from the site of Huayurco to argue that cultures living in Peru’s northern ceja de selva actually strengthened their relationship with societies living in Ecuador during the latter half of the first millennium BCE, a trend that would continue into the subsequent first millennium AD, likely in order to maintain access to certain types of products used for ritual paraphernalia. The evidence from this paper reinforces the idea that the Northern and Central Andes were not separated by a hard border but rather shifting cultural frontiers that contributed to the cultural trajectories of both regions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cuando los senderos divergen: Reconsiderando las interacciones entre los Andes Septentrionales y los Andes Centrales durante el 1ro y 2do milenio AEC / When Paths Diverge: Reconsidering Interactions between the Northern and Central Andes, First–Second Millennium BCE   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39595.0