Identity And Power In The Ancient Andes

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book is a study of the ways places are created and how they attain meaning. Smith presents archaeological data from Khonkho Wankane in the southern Lake Titicaca basin of Bolivia to explore how landscapes were imagined and constructed during processes of political centralization in this region. In particular he examines landscapes of movement and the development of powerful political and religious centers during the Late Formative period (200 BC–AD 500), just before the emergence of the urban state centered at Tiwanaku (AD 500–1100). Late Formative politico-religious centers, Smith notes, were characterized by mobile populations of agropastoralists and caravan drovers. By exploring ritual practice at Late Formative settlements, Smith provides a new way of looking at political centralization, incipient urbanism, and state formation at Tiwanaku.

The Ancient Andean States combines modern social theory, recent archaeological literature, and the experience of the author to examine politics and power in the great Andean pre-Hispanic societies. The ancient Andean states were the great shapers of Peruvian prehistory. Social complexity, architectural monumentality, and specialized economic production, among others, were features of these sophisticated societies known by professionals and travelers from around the world. How and when these states emerged and succeeded is still debated. By examining Andean pre-Hispanic societies such as Caral, Sechín, Chavín, Moche, Wari, Chimú, and Inca, this book delves into their political and economic structures as well as explores their ideological worldviews. It reveals how these societies were organized and how different social groups interacted in the states. Archaeologists and anthropologists interested in Peruvian archaeology and the political and social structures of ancient societies will find this book to be a valuable addition to their shelves.

"Exploring the multiple social, ecological, cultural, and ontological dimensions of food in the Andean past, this book offers a diverse set of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches that reveal the richness, sophistication, and ingenuity of Andean peoples. With 44 contributors from 10 countries, the studies presented in this volume employ new analytical methods, integrating different food data and interdisciplinary research to show how food impacts socio-political relationships and ontologies that are otherwise invisible in the archaeological record"--

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.

​Over the millennia, from stone tools among early foragers to clays to prized metals and mineral pigments used by later groups, mineral resources have had a pronounced role in the Andean world. Archaeologists have used a variety of analytical techniques on the materials that ancient peoples procured from the earth. What these materials all have in common is that they originated in a mine or quarry. Despite their importance, comparative analysis between these archaeological sites and features has been exceptionally rare, and even more so for the Andes. Mining and Quarrying in the Ancient Andes focuses on archaeological research at primary deposits of minerals extracted through mining or quarrying in the Andean region. While mining often begins with an economic need, it has important social, political, and ritual dimensions as well. The contributions in this volume place evidence of primary extraction activities within the larger cultural context in which they occurred. This important contribution to the interdisciplinary literature presents research and analysis on the mining and quarrying of various materials throughout the region and through time. Thus, rather than focusing on one material type or one specific site, Mining and Quarrying in the Ancient Andes incorporates a variety of all the aspects of mining, by focusing on the physical, social, and ritual aspects of procuring materials from the earth in the Andean past.

The human head has had important political, ritual and symbolic meanings throughout Andean history. Scholars have spoken of captured and trophy heads, curated crania, symbolic flying heads, head imagery on pots and on stone, head-shaped vessels, and linguistic references to the head. In this synthesizing work, cultural anthropologist Denise Arnold and archaeologist Christine Hastorf examine the cult of heads in the Andes—past and present—to develop a theory of its place in indigenous cultural practice and its relationship to political systems. Using ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork, highland-lowland comparisons, archival documents, oral histories, and ritual texts, the authors draw from Marx, Mauss, Foucault, Assadourian, Viveiros del Castro and other theorists to show how heads shape and symbolize power, violence, fertility, identity, and economy in South American cultures.