Molding Bricks and Making Place: Earthen Architecture in the Cañoncillo Archaeological Complex

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The built environment of the Cañoncillo Archaeological Complex in the northern coast of Peru is dominated by earthen architecture constructed and modified within a span of 1,800 years. Although the sites within the Complex—Jatanca (500BCE–100 CE), Huaca Colorada (650–950 CE) and Tecapa (800–1100 CE)—were each constructed out of materials sourced from their shared landscape, the stark stylistic and structural contrast observed between these sites reveals essential differences in the conception of place-making and place among the communities that inhabited each site. Thus, Cañoncillo serves as an ideal lens to interrogate the ways in which people across time made places that produced distinctive earthen architecture in terms of form and fabric. A close inspection of these processes of making earthen architecture offers an important vantage point to understand unique conceptions of space and time within the communities that built and dwelled within each site; mutually-constitutive relationships between people and the Cañoncillo landscape; and interdependencies among cogent political communities. In this paper, I mobilize the preliminary results of morphological, material, and geoarchaeological analyses carried out between 2018 and 2020 to reconstruct meaningful, site-specific processes of making earthen architecture within the Cañoncillo Archaeological Complex and to consider their implications for understanding intercommunal dynamics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 2   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39361.0