Multispecies Migrations as Emplaced Knowledge in Chavin Calendars

Author(s): Nicholas Brown

Year: 2025

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Emplacement and Relational Approaches to the Ancient Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

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This presentation explores "pan-Andean" practices of place-making and time-keeping during the 1<sup>st</sup> millennium B.C. across distant corners of the Chavin world, including Ancash, Pasco, and Ica (Peru). Relational analysis of the webs of beings in Chavin ritual arts can reveal commonalities and disjunctures in the emplacement of monuments, such as stone sculptures at the central highland temples of Chavin de Huantar and Chawin Punta, as well as painted textiles from the south coast cemeteries of Samaca, Karwa, and Coyungo. Visual links between these far-flung corpora form the basis for a new model of Chavin calendars that integrates embodied principles of solar orientation from ancient "crossed dances" with emplaced environmental knowledge of migratory animals like birds and whales. The cyclical fabric of space-time (pacha) in the Chavin cosmos can thus be framed in relational terms as a multi-species network of seasonal movements to and from the places archaeologists call ceremonial centers.

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Cite this Record

Multispecies Migrations as Emplaced Knowledge in Chavin Calendars. Nicholas Brown. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 510086)

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Keywords

General
Mesoamerica • network analysis • South America • Theory

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51477