Stress and Collapse: Histological Analysis of Enamel Fragments from Tumilaca La Chimba in the Moquegua Valley, Peru

Summary

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

Periods of political fragmentation are often, but not necessarily, associated with precarity and declines in overall health, especially among vulnerable members of affected communities. The collapse of the Tiwanaku state in southern Peru is one such context where the effects of top-down disintegration had varying impacts on provincial regions, making it an ideal locus for exploring changes, or lack thereof, in health through time. This study compares the frequencies of micro-defects in tooth enamel known as accentuated lines, which provide evidence of stress episodes during infancy and early childhood, in individuals from two occupation phases at a provincial site of Tumilaca la Chimba in Moquegua, Peru. These two cohorts are associated with the Tiwanaku collapse during the Terminal Middle Horizon (TMH, 1000-1250 CE) and subsequent Late Intermediate Period (LIP, 1250-1470 CE).

Results indicate no significant difference in the prevalence of accentuated lines between the TMH cohort (N=8) compared to the LIP cohort (N = 16), though prevalence in the former may be associated with earlier age at death. These results support existing interpretations of local continuity and stability in Moquegua, though with more subtle signs of stress in the immediate aftermath of Tiwanaku’s fragmentation in the region.

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): 54021