Searching for the Domestic at Chavín: Integrating 20-Plus years of Archaeology in La Banda

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Chavín de Huántar’s Contribution to Understanding the Central Andean Formative: Results and Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Even after more than a century of research at Chavín de Huántar, two key questions remain about who the ceremonial center was built for and who it was built by. As research attention has largely focused on pilgrims, priests, and peer polities, the labor force and craft specialists whose activities were fundamental to the site’s success have remained backgrounded. Excavations outside of the monumental core, beginning in the 1970s, have attempted to address this elephant in the room, but salvage excavations associated with the 2003 construction of a new road on the east side of the Río Mosna were the first to produce any broad areal exposure of Chavín architecture outside the monumental core. In this paper we use “rescue photogrammetry” from photos and total station data produced by two decades of investigations in La Banda to consider the extent and character of that architecture. Integrating these data makes it possible to consider whether densely packed small-scale structures are necessarily proto-urban or even urban, whether non-monumental Chavín is necessarily domestic, and whether activity in La Banda was integral or marginal to Chavín’s function as a ceremonial center.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Chavín de Huántar’s Contribution to Understanding the Central Andean Formative: Results and Perspectives   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39823.0