Care in Crisis, Crisis as Care: A Comparative, Multi-scalar Archaeology of Care in Periods of Sociopolitical Disruption

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Care and Power" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

If sites, practitioners, and structures of care are embedded in power dynamics, how are those components of care systems transformed when established power dynamics are radically disrupted? Drawing on the substantial comparative archaeological literature that has been published in recent decades on processes and periods often glossed as ‘post-collapse’, I identify commonalities and divergences in the practice and the distribution of care in the wake of political fragmentation. I then focus in depth on a case study associated with the transformation of the Tiwanaku polity in the south-central Andes circa 1000 CE. Adopting a multi-scalar and diachronic approach, I examine shifts in individual, community, and inter-community care over 400 years among descendants of Tiwanaku affiliated populations in the Moquegua Valley. I explore the ways in which material and non-human actors were both embedded in and constitutive of pre and post ‘collapse’ ecologies of support. Finally, following Duclos and Sánchez Criado’s call to trouble the care concept, I propose that beyond understanding care as a system of elements that was impacted by political fragmentation, crisis and ‘collapse’ might collectively be reconceptualized as a form of care in the Moquegua Valley post 1000 CE.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• The Archaeology of Care and Power

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50420