Defining the Domestic at Chavín de Huántar: Learning from the La Banda Sector
Author(s): Jacob Roberts
Year: 2025
Summary
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
<html>
Excavations in the La Banda Sector at Chavín de Huántar have since 2003 exposed dense small-scale architecture that suggests living and working spaces of the labor force and craft specialists who were fundamental to the growth and success of this monumental center. The possible presence of walled compounds revives questions of whether urban settlement was associated with Chavín. Integration of data from the last two decades of research brings into focus a more fundamental question: how should this dense architecture be interpreted? How should the categories of “domestic” and “urban” be understood in the Middle Formative Period Central Andes, if they are in fact appropriate at all? Here we integrate diverse data produced over >20 years to explore the layout, density, and function of architecture in La Banda. Architectural data from >600 m<sup>2 </sup>of excavated area suggests the existence of walled compounds similar to central Andean examples from the subsequent millennium. We compare the scale, orientation and layout of these compounds to later examples to explore whether these compounds from Chavin fit an Andean urban pattern.
</html>
Cite this Record
Defining the Domestic at Chavín de Huántar: Learning from the La Banda Sector. Jacob Roberts. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 511024)
This Resource is Part of the Following Collections
Keywords
Record Identifiers
Abstract Id(s): 53319