Ancient Alterity In The Andes

Ancient Alterity in the Andes is the first major treatment on ancient alterity: how people in the past regarded others. At least since the 1970s, alterity has been an influential concept in different fields, from art history, psychology and philosophy, to linguistics and ethnography. Having gained steam in concert with postmodernism’s emphasis on self-reflection and discourse, it is especially significant now as a framework to understand the process of ‘writing’ and understanding the Other: groups, cultures and cosmologies. This book showcases this concept by illustrating how people visualised others in the past, and how it coloured their engagements with them, both physically and cognitively. Alterity has yet to see sustained treatment in archaeology due in great part to the fact that the archaeological record is not always equipped to inform on the subject. Like its kindred concepts, such as identity and ethnicity, alterity is difficult to observe also because it can be expressed at different times and scales, from the individual, family and village settings, to contexts such as nations and empires. It can also be said to ‘reside’ just as well in objects and individuals, as it may in a technique, action or performance. One requires a relevant, holistic data set and multiple lines of evidence. Ancient Alterity in the Andes provides just that by focusing on the great achievements of the ancient Andes during the first millennium AD, centred on a Precolumbian culture, known as Recuay (AD 1-700). Using a new framework of alterity, one based on social others (e.g., kinsfolk, animals, predators, enemies, ancestral dead), the book rethinks cultural relationships with other groups, including the Moche and Nasca civilisations of Peru’s coast, the Chavín cult, and the later Wari, the first Andean empire. In revealing little known patterns in Andean prehistory the book illuminates the ways that archaeologists, in general, can examine alterity through the existing record. Ancient Alterity in the Andes is a substantial boon to the analysis and writing of past cultures, social systems and cosmologies and an important book for those wishing to understand this developing concept in archaeological theory.

Andean peoples recognize places as neither sacred nor profane, but rather in terms of the power they emanate and the identities they materialize and reproduce. This book argues that a careful consideration of Andean conceptions of powerful places is critical not only to understanding Andean political and religious history but to rethinking sociological theories on landscapes more generally. The contributors evaluate ethnographic and ethnohistoric analogies against the material record to illuminate the ways landscapes were experienced and politicized over the last three thousand years.

This book examines the varied faces of war, politics, and violent spectacle over thousands of years in the pre-Columbian Andes.

Nasca pots, Quimbaya figurines, Moche porn figures, stone shamans. Fakes and forgeries run rampant in the Andean art collections of international museums and private individuals. Authors Karen Bruhns and Nancy Kelker examine the phenomenon in this eye-opening volume. They discuss the most commonly forged classes and styles of artifacts, many of which were being duplicated as early as the 19th century. More important, they describe the system whereby these objects get made, purchased, authenticated, and placed in major museums as well as the complicity of forgers, dealers, curators, and collectors in this system. Unique to this volume are biographies of several of the forgers, who describe their craft and how they are able to effectively fool connoisseurs and specialists. This is an important accessible introduction to pre-Columbian art fraud for archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals alike. A parallel volume by the same authors discusses fakes in Mesoamerican archaeology.

This book argues that a careful consideration of Andean conceptions of powerful places is critical not only to understanding Andean political and religious history but to rethinking sociological theories on landscapes more generally.

There is widespread acknowledgement among anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnobotanists, as well as researchers in related disciplines that specific foods and cuisines are linked very strongly to the formation and maintenance of cultural identity and ethnicity. Strong associations of foodways with culture are particularly characteristic of South American Andean cultures. Food and drink convey complex social and cultural meanings that can provide insights into regional interactions, social complexity, cultural hybridization, and ethnogenesis. This edited volume presents novel and creative anthropological, archaeological, historical, and iconographic research on Andean food and culture from diverse temporal periods and spatial settings. The breadth and scope of the contributions provides original insights into a diversity of topics, such as the role of food in Andean political economies, the transformation of foodways and cuisines through time, and ancient iconographic representations of plants and animals that were used as food. Thus, this volume is distinguished from most of the published literature in that specific foods, cuisines, and culinary practices are the primary subject matter through which aspects of Andean culture are interpreted.

Living with the Dead in the Andes provides new data and insights informed by general anthropological theory; the extensive bibliography alone is an important contribution. Scholars working with Andean mortuary practices (and prehistory generally) will be citing these chapters for years.

This book focuses on South American archaeology and its contributions to the broader global archaeological discussion in theory, methods and new interpretations of the archaeological record. These include discussions on human peopling and colonization of the continent, domestication of plants and emergence of complex societies. This volume covers a wide variety of sub-disciplines in archaeology, including archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, molecular archaeology, bioarchaeology, geoarchaeology. The chapters span from the pre-Columbian to contemporaneous indigenous societies for all the main geographical and ecological zones of South America. The book discusses how particular cases of South American archaeology have contributed to the understanding of a global and basic issue: human relations with their environments and landscapes during the past. The authors focus on the latest results produced by multidisciplinary studies carried out at archaeological sites in several areas of South America ranging from studies of early hunter-gatherers through the historic period. This work would be of interest to researchers in archaeology and Latin American studies.