Cuisine and Craft at Ancient Hualcayán: Exploring Ceremonial Production during the Chavín to Recuay Transition (900 BCE–1000 CE)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "After the Feline Cult: Social Dynamics and Cultural Reinvention after Chavín" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper, we explore the production techniques, provenances, and uses of the pottery and foods important for different kinds of ceremonies throughout the Chavín to Recuay transition at Hualcayán, an ancient community located in the Callejón de Huaylas valley of highland Ancash, Peru. Ritual celebrations were a salient feature of social and political life at Hualcayán, where people fortified community ties through feasting, drink, and cooperative building projects over several millennia. Here, we combine analyses of ceramic paste technologies, the possible provenance of geomaterials used to make pottery, and the evidence for food production and procurement practices that were essential to these ceremonies. We conducted laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and thin section petrography on a preliminary sample of ceramics and performed macrobotanical, microbotanical, and faunal analysis of food remains recovered across ritual contexts and time periods at Hualcayán. By analyzing these datasets together, we aim to highlight the many sequences of practice involved in or indexed during these ritual events while exploring the changing social and material relationships that underlaid Chavín, Huarás, and Recuay communities between 900 BCE and 1000 CE.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• After the Feline Cult: Social Dynamics and Cultural Reinvention after Chavín   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39828.0