The Aesthetics and Poetics of Infrastructures in Ancient Andean Urbanism

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Social scientists have stressed the invisibility of modern infrastructures, whether roads, irrigation systems, or hidden electrical wires and plumbing. They have argued in turn that as a system of interconnected substrates, infrastructures recede to the background and become the subject of conscious reckoning primarily when they fail or breakdown. However, infrastructures in both pre-industrial and contemporary societies often form critical nodes of larger religious landscapes, and they become key sites of urban spectacle. Inspired by the theories of Rancière, Larkin, Lefebvre, and others, this paper examines the seamless interconnection of architecture, religious aesthetics, and infrastructures in Ancient Andean cities and elsewhere. It also critiques the archaeological tendency to ignore the performative aspect of construction projects—often highly visible, politically charged, and protracted affairs. In the end, infrastructures played a central role in the constitution of ancient urban subjects not simply by prescribing movement or controlling access to resources but by wedding the aesthetics of place with religious cosmology, imagination, community self-esteem, and sentiments of empowerment.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38092.0