The Andean Urban Center of Cajamarquilla: Environmental and Occupational Dynamics

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Central Andes saw a long and complex development of prehistoric urban life. Although considerable progress has been made in understanding this process, our assessment is still very fragmentary due to the lack of key data on centers that appear to have been pivotal at the regional scale. In this paper, I examine Cajamarquilla, a site (> 100 ha) on the Peruvian central coast, distinguished by a major irrigation and vast underground storage system and repeatedly cited in the discussions on the Middle Horizon (AD 600-1000) and Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1476). Until recently, however, such considerations were based without well-defined chronology of its main occupations and a multi-disciplinary reconstruction of the local environmental conditions that framed its development and decline. We discuss two major outcomes of our 2012-2015 fieldwork at the site: the implications of a new set of radiocarbon dates and their provenance, and the results of our environmentally-oriented geomorphological survey and paleobotanical analysis. Together, they allow us to reexamine the relationship between urban evolution at Cajamarquilla and the social and biophysical dynamics that occurred during the last 1,000 years preceding the European conquest.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51464