Pulsating Tiwanaku: The Seasonal Surges that Built an Andean City

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Movable Feast: Mobility and Commensalism in the Andes" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Tiwanaku has long been compared to Cuzco, Rome, or Teotihuacán, but generalized models of state and empire have overlooked a crucial difference: Tiwanaku was built by mobile agropastoralists bound to the seasonal rhythms of the arid Andes. This dynamic means Tiwanaku's population was much lower than previously suggested and saw pronounced seasonal fluctuations. In the lead up to festival season, raised fields were farmed in order to supply feasts, principally to make beer. Beer was served in the region's most elaborate ceramics to that point, Tiwanaku redwares, driving the "chicha economy." These vessels carried potent and portable visual messaging beyond Tiwanaku after festival season. Feasts incorporated work parties, which provided the manual labor to build the city's monuments. This honored and paid debts to shared ancestors, embodied as carved monolith beings. This vision of Tiwanaku accounts for the curious lack of storage buildings, formal roads, and princely burials. This history of the city is to anchored to recently-updated Bayesian chronological models that track migrants, a previously-undocumented volcanic eruption, multiple generations of near-abandonment, and collapse ~AD 1010–1050 that is unrelated to drought. Rather than through competition or bureaucracy, agropastoralists built this Andean city by seasonally leveraging large-scale, inclusive forms of cooperation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• A Movable Feast: Mobility and Commensalism in the Andes

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52465