Seasonality and Intermittent Occupation of High-Altitude Towns in the Cusco Region during the Late Intermediate Period

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.

With this exploratory paper, I present and interpret the results of laboratory analyses of excavated materials from the Formative (ca. 2200 BCE - 200 CE) and Late Intermediate Period (ca. 1000-1350 CE) towns of Matagua and Wat'a, located in and near the Cusco Valley of Perú. The goal of the paper is to gauge whether these settlements were occupied and inhabited year-round, or whether they were used on a seasonal or intermittent basis during these time frames. Empirically, I draw on taphonomic data from faunal remains and pottery samples, as well as precisely dated sequences of building and deposition events. In more general terms, I discuss the archaeological evidence for seasonality, and its implications for anthropological understandings of social organization in the ancient South Central Andes, relative to Southern Quechua understandings of spatial frames of reference and scalarity, and in contrast to archaeological theories that equate a people, a culture, and a landscape. Centering on these issues can fosters a more fluid understanding of cultural temporalities and ecologies that challenges conventional archaeological attempts to economically model the past in terms of static "polities" and "periods."

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): 52733