Heads of State Arnold, Denise Y.; Hastorf, Christine A.
2008, 20160701, 2016-07-01, 2016-06-29
eBook
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.
The Lake Titicaca basin was one of the major centers for cultural development in the ancient world. This lacustrine environment is unique in the high, dry Andean
, and its aquatic and terrestrial ...resources are thought to have contributed to the florescence of complex societies in this region. Nevertheless, it remains unclear to what extent local aquatic resources, particularly fish, and the introduced crop, maize, which can be grown in regions along the lakeshores, contributed to facilitating sustained food production and population growth, which underpinned increasing social political complexity starting in the Formative Period (1400 BCE to 500 CE) and culminating with the Tiwanaku state (500 to 1100 CE). Here, we present direct dietary evidence from stable isotope analysis of human skeletal remains spanning over two millennia, together with faunal and floral reference materials, to reconstruct foodways and ecological interactions in southern Lake Titicaca over time. Bulk stable isotope analysis, coupled with compound-specific amino acid stable isotope analysis, allows better discrimination between resources consumed across aquatic and terrestrial environments. Together, this evidence demonstrates that human diets predominantly relied on C
plants, particularly quinoa and tubers, along with terrestrial animals, notably domestic camelids. Surprisingly, fish were not a significant source of animal protein, but a slight increase in C
plant consumption verifies the increasing importance of maize in the Middle Horizon. These results underscore the primary role of local terrestrial food resources in securing a nutritious diet that allowed for sustained population growth, even in the face of documented climate and political change across these periods.
This article looks at how surplus is not only an economic reality but a state of mind, created by and reflecting the social and political relations of a group, by considering examples of historic and ...prehistoric food surplus. The state of one's surplus is not just what one stores, but also how others see it and think about it. Individuals are not alone, but always think of their surplus within a larger network of social and political interactions with others who are also storing food as well as within the rules for access. These networks have been considered safety nets by archaeologists, but often, as with many situations today, the populace does not have access to the safety net. Two case studies illustrate the dynamics and differences of this constructed side of food surplus.
Chemical analyses of carbonized and absorbed organic residues from archaeological ceramic cooking vessels can provide a unique window into the culinary cultures of ancient people, resource use, and ...environmental effects by identifying ingredients used in ancient meals. However, it remains uncertain whether recovered organic residues represent only the final foodstuffs prepared or are the accumulation of various cooking events within the same vessel. To assess this, we cooked seven mixtures of C
and C
foodstuffs in unglazed pots once per week for one year, then changed recipes between pots for the final cooking events. We conducted bulk stable-isotope analysis and lipid residue analysis on the charred food macro-remains, carbonized thin layer organic patina residues and absorbed lipids over the course of the experiment. Our results indicate that: (1) the composition of charred macro-remains represent the final foodstuffs cooked within vessels, (2) thin-layer patina residues represent a mixture of previous cooking events with bias towards the final product(s) cooked in the pot, and (3) absorbed lipid residues are developed over a number of cooking events and are replaced slowly over time, with little evidence of the final recipe ingredients.
Simple pebble tools, ephemeral cultural features, and the remains of maritime and terrestrial foods are present in undisturbed Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene deposits underneath a large ...human-made mound at Huaca Prieta and nearby sites on the Pacific coast of northern Peru. Radiocarbon ages indicate an intermittent human presence dated between ~15,000 and 8000 calendar years ago before the mound was built. The absence of fishhooks, harpoons, and bifacial stone tools suggests that technologies of gathering, trapping, clubbing, and exchange were used primarily to procure food resources along the shoreline and in estuarine wetlands and distant mountains. The stone artifacts are minimally worked unifacial stone tools characteristic of several areas of South America. Remains of avocado, bean, and possibly cultivated squash and chile pepper are also present, suggesting human transport and consumption. Our new findings emphasize an early coastal lifeway of diverse food procurement strategies that suggest detailed observation of resource availability in multiple environments and a knowledgeable economic organization, although technologies were simple and campsites were seemingly ephemeral and discontinuous. These findings raise questions about the pace of early human movement along some areas of the Pacific coast and the level of knowledge and technology required to exploit maritime and inland resources.
In this study, we assess competing interpretations of a burnt ceremonial structure from the terminal Middle Formative period (ca. 300–100 BCE) by analyzing the stepped platform mound at Chiripa, ...Bolivia, through a systematic reconstruction of the fire that destroyed it. We developed a model of potential fire pathways, their social contexts, and material indicators. Our approach contrasts
incipient
fires from accident or arson to
planned
fires initiated for functional or social ends. We assessed these pathways for the Chiripa mound fire through experimental, geoarchaeological, faunal, and botanical data. Experiments were aimed at deducing the temperature, duration, and oxidation conditions of the fire. The fire temperature and duration were approximated from geoarchaeological analyses of construction materials in comparison with controls, and thermal alteration of faunal bone. Fuels were reconstructed through paleoethnobotanical analysis of charred remains from discrete areas within the burnt structure. We conclude that an intentional fire burned the structures on the Chiripa mound to temperatures of 700 °C or higher under oxidizing conditions for several hours. The pattern of heat-altered materials recovered would have required a substantial supplemental fuel load. At the 3840 masl elevation of Chiripa, the effective control of a high temperature oxidizing fire demonstrates technical expertise in fire management. Our findings indicate the fire appears intentional, likely a ritual event. We believe the structures were burned to facilitate a socio-political change during a period of social transition at the end of the Middle Formative period in Bolivia.
This paper examines an eighteenth-century roof in Chinchero, Peru to show the critical role played by roofs in Andean communities across time. Roofs can reveal identity constructions, continuation of ...traditions, adaptations to new influences, and relationships to local environments and the sacred. We present a discussion of the importance of roofs in architectural history, the critical role played by roofs in Inca architecture, and a description of the colonial period roof in Chinchero, along with its facture, dates of construction, botanical identification, and the environmental zones from where these items could have been gathered. En este artículo se analiza un techo del siglo dieciocho en Chinchero, Perú, con el objetivo de mostrar la importancia que tuvieron los techos en las comunidades andinas a lo largo del tiempo. Los techos revelan construcciones de identidad, continuidad de tradiciones, adaptaciones a nuevas influencias y relaciones con los ambientes locales y con lo sagrado. Presentamos aquí una discusión sobre la importancia de los techos para la historia de la arquitectura y el papel fundamental que estos desempeñaron en la arquitectura Inca. Asimismo, describimos el techo del periodo colonial en Chinchero y discutimos su fabricación, fechas de construcción, identificación botánica de los materiales y las zonas ambientales donde estos elementos podrían haberse obtenido.
Investigations of how past human societies managed during times of major climate change can inform our understanding of potential human responses to ongoing environmental change. In this study, we ...evaluate the impact of environmental variation on human communities over the last four millennia in the southern Lake Titicaca basin of the Andes, known as Lake Wiñaymarka. Refined paleoenvironmental reconstructions from new diatom-based reconstructions of lake level together with archaeological evidence of animal and plant resource use from sites on the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia, reveal frequent climate and lake-level changes within major cultural phases. We posit that climate fluctuations alone do not explain major past social and political transformations but instead that a highly dynamic environment contributed to the development of flexible and diverse subsistence practices by the communities in the Titicaca Basin.
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