Burying Buildings: Ritual Closure as Mortuary Practice (or not) in the Ancient Andes?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ritual Closures, temple interments, and construction offerings are a common occurrence in the Prehispanic Andes region of South America. This practice became more elaborate overtime, and societies selected a wide range of goods for inclusion as offerings, which in some cases included human sacrifices or were accompanied by ancestral remains. Given the diversity of this long-lived tradition, such patterned practices and the resulting ritual deposits can offer a means to track the movement of people and interactions between groups. Seemingly broad ontological understandings of the relations between people, landscape features, and crafted objects, including buildings, may have dictated that some of these entities be treated as people. In this paper, I explore the features of ritual closure traditions among societies of the South-Central Andes, who flourished during the first millennium CE to assess the commonalities and differences between groups and the relationship of ritual closure events to mortuary practices. Some buildings seem to be buried because they were burial chambers, whereas others may have required burial because the house or temple was itself laid to rest as a once "living" member of the group.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51430