Sacrifice as Politics, Killing as Identity: Regional Synthesis and New Evidence of Late Prehispanic Human Sacrifice in the Lambayeque Valley Complex, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ritual Violence and Human Sacrifice in the Ancient Andes: New Directions in the Field" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Diverse new understandings involving human sacrifice on the north coast of Peru have surfaced since 1994. In the Lambayeque Valley Complex on the northern north coast of Peru, an extensive and diachronic record of human sacrifice from several sites spanning nearly 400 individuals have been documented beginning in 2002. This paper provides a current archaeological and bioarchaeological synthesis of ritual killing in Lambayeque, from Late Moche to Inka times (550–1532 CE). Special emphasis is placed on how sacrifice reveals extended political histories: how elites and non-elites both managed and manipulated power relationships, political economies, and systems of statecraft in the offerings of human lives to the supernatural. We also consider that among complex multiethnic late prehispanic cultures, victim and group identity was also key to structuring sacrificial programs. This paper includes new evidence from the sites of Pampa Grande and Santa Rosa de Pucalá, illustrating for the first time regional Late Moche and intrusive Wari-associated ritual killings (550–850 CE), foreshadowing the development of large-scale sacrifice systems in the centuries to follow. Also considered are a series of extremely puzzling Middle/Late Sicán contexts (1050–1300 CE) documented at Huaca Lercanlech which illustrate various challenges in the study of ancient sacrifice.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ritual Violence and Human Sacrifice in the Ancient Andes: New Directions in the Field   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41520.0