Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Ritual and Status: Mortuary Display at the Household Level at the Middle Horizon Site of Conchopata

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Ancient Andean empires were communications dinosaurs; information and decision-making traveled only as fast as a human could, and the Andean peoples did not know writing. Lacking the administrative technology of contemporaneous European or Asian states, the native empires of the Andes were forced to develop alternative modes of statecraft, and other principles to integrate their subject populations. Archaeologists have long suspected, based on Spanish eyewitness accounts of the Inka empire, that one of the crucial integrative mechanisms of prehispanic statecraft was the elaborate mortuary practices of the politically important. In the Inka empire, the carefully kept bodies of deceased rulers served as material symbols of dynastic succession and political continuity. Through periodic rituals and fine mausoleums mummies were the setting for public communication of messages of political legitimization and imperial authority. While the role of the dead in Inka statecraft has been well studied, much less is known about this topic in early Andean empires, such as the Wari; in some ways a fore-runner of the Inka that dominated the highlands between AD 400 and 800. Ms. Charlene Milliken's doctoral dissertation project, conducted under the direction of Dr. Marc Bermann, will investigate the site of Conchopata, Peru. At its height, Conchopata was a secondary center of the Wari empire (A.D. 600-1000) and consisted of residential zones, public plazas, pottery workshops, temples, and specialized mortuary complexes. Excavation will center on residential contexts associated with two mortuary complexes, and research will test the hypothesis that these mortuary complexes were used by Conchopata elites in the veneration of important ancestors. Conchopata is a particularly good location for this research because several intact mortuary structures have been uncovered; normally these kinds of facilities were looted or destroyed long ago. This project will provide the first investigation of the potential role of mortuary activity in Wari political statecraft as one native means by which authority is constructed and expressed in non-literate, non-Western populations.