Translocal and Imagined Communities of the Chavín Phenomenon, Peru
Author(s): Michelle Young
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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Contact period documents indicate that many highland Andean groups claimed descent from other-than-human entities within the landscape. From mighty mountain lords (apu) to high-altitude lagoons (cocha), Andean peoples’ origins, and their identities as broadly constructed, have been understood as tied to ancestral places. But was local topography and place-making the only source of indigenous Andean identity? Archaeological excavations in the Huancavelica region of Peru offer an opportunity to examine the role of mobility and relationality in the construction of community identities. I argue that the patterns of ritual architecture and ceramics of the 1<sup>st</sup> millennium BCE that archaeologists refer to as the “Chavín Phenomenon” was produced through translocality, that is, interactions that produce communities unbounded by space (Womack 2024; see also Anderson 1983; Appadurai 1995; Furholt 2017; Gaspar et al. 2022; Goldstein 2000; Isbell 2000). Through this lens, the act of emplacement transcends discrete physical locations and can be understood as rooted in shared traditions, sacred values, and world views. This exploration of ancient identities reaffirms the complex, intersectional, and multifaceted nature of human identity construction in the past and present.
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Cite this Record
Translocal and Imagined Communities of the Chavín Phenomenon, Peru. Michelle Young. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 510087)
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Keywords
General
Mesoamerica
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network analysis
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South America
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Theory
Record Identifiers
Abstract Id(s): 51476