Energetics Approaches to Early Ceremonial Centers in Highland Peru (1000-500 BCE)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Social Dynamics in the North Highlands of Peru during the Formative Period: Pacopampa project’s Contribution for Understanding the Early Complex Societies in the Andes" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The late second millennium BCE is characterized by the appearance of several major highland civic-ceremonial centers including, Chavín de Huántar, Canchas Uckro, Pacopampa, Kuntur Wasi, Atalla, and Campanayuq Rumi, among others. While the inhabitants of these centers interacted with one another, the architecture that characterized these sites varied in meaningful ways. One way that these differences can be empirically studied is through determining the labor invested in their construction. In this presentation, I present energetics calculations of the monumental architecture of Pacopampa and compare it with other highland centers to arrive at new interpretations of variations in sociopolitical organization for the period between c. 1000 and 500 BCE.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Social Dynamics in the North Highlands of Peru during the Formative Period: Pacopampa project’s Contribution for Understanding the Early Complex Societies in the Andes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50191