Chavín and Its Galleries: An Inside View of the Andean Formative Period

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.

Understanding the unique gallery system at Chavín de Huántar has been one of the PIACCh’s primary goals over the past 30 years. Research objectives that began in the mid-1990s with the challenge of simply making accurate maps of these internal spaces, evolved to address broader questions ranging from ancient construction principles and design language, to architectural growth and chronology and ritual uses and ideology— and how these changed over time. To investigate these topics the project applied numerous methods including digital mapping, architectural analyses, excavations, remote sensing, digital scanning, chronometric methods such as radiocarbon dating of architectural mortar and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of construction materials, acoustical studies, and robotic exploration. This paper highlights some of the important results of this work. It then examines a case study of galleries within the main temple building (Building A) as well as the building south of the Plaza Mayor, considering directions for future research. The view from Chavín’s galleries reveals profound insights that these enigmatic spaces bring to our understanding of the Andean Formative period, emphasizing their fundamental role in the site’s physical and ideological growth while underscoring the need to research architecture as an independent variable and data source.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39788.0