Tombs as Evidence for Religious Diversity in the Late Prehispanic Sacred Valley, Peru (ca. 1000–1532 CE)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Ancestors: New Approaches to Andean "Open Sepulchers"" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper articulates a novel approach to prehispanic Andean funerary architecture that interprets differences in materiality and temporality as evidence for distinct religious traditions. I analyze a sample of 845 tombs throughout the Sacred Valley, Peru, and adjacent tributary valleys, built and used during the Late Intermediate and Inka periods (ca. 1000–1532 CE). This sample, combining primary and published datasets, includes a wide variety of tomb structures that would have variably facilitated or impeded particular interactions and relationships between the living, the dead, and nonhuman agents. To understand this diversity, I develop a typology comprising seven tomb types, which display overlapping distribution at local and regional scales. In contrast to studies that assumed general homogeneity and commonality in Indigenous Andean mortuary practices, this data set attests to considerable diversity in belief and value systems over a 500-year period. As such, this study presents new interpretations of late prehispanic interment styles and funerary structures, considering that Indigenous Andeans across time and space have held divergent beliefs about life and death.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond the Ancestors: New Approaches to Andean "Open Sepulchers"   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38568.0