The Casma State Heartland: A Community-Centered Regional Perspective

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.

This presentation explores the development, apogee, and denouement of the Casma State in the hinterland context of its capital city, El Purgatorio. El Purgatorio developed within a congested countryside populated by ethnically homogenous people who recognized their own North-Central Coastal identity. In the fourteenth century, the encroachment of the Chimu Empire provoked the consolidation of the Casma heartland into an urbanized landscape. At its core was El Purgatorio, a city that saw massive growth and density increase from AD 1290 to 1405, followed by a rapid exodus and subsequent Chimu-Casma rule in the Valley. Recent evidence from Casma State sites around El Purgatorio supports the theory of this unusual urban growth. More generally, the current evidence for the development of El Purgatorio and its hinterland provides reactivated interest in alternative models of urbanism, including that of low- and medium-density urbanism. It raises questions about the knock-on effects of these urban forms with respect to models of state formation including that of the secondary state and the shadow state. Only by examining the smaller settlements and communities that compose and surround urban capitals are we able to get a nuanced and clear picture of social intensification in the ancient world.

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): 37987.0