Review of Ancient Alterity in the Andes.pdf

The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, 2013

N.B. This entry targets particularly the Central Andes, and the last five millennia before the Spanish conquest. Earlier questions of first settlement are covered by other contributors.]

Latin American Antiquity, 2019

The remains of monumental mounds and the skeletons of large-scale irrigation systems, which transformed vast swaths of coastal and highland terrain, have captured the interests of Andean archaeologists asking an array of questions for more than 50 years. Justin Jennings and Edward S. Swenson's edited volume Powerful Places in the Ancient Andes critiques these earlier efforts and asserts an ontological vocabulary on studies of the built environment and the animated Andean topography. Many contributors adopt ideas and nomenclature from Lefebvre's The Production of Space, and several emphasize the importance of circulations between human and nonhuman as essential acts that vitalize both parties. The introductory chapter is a lengthy critique of previous interpretations of space and place and outlines concepts that contribute to an ontological engagement with Andean architectural artifacts. Authors of other chapters offer a wide array of approaches and consider the animacy of built and telluric entities.

Journal of Archaeological Research, 1997

This paper reviews the rapidly changing archaeology conducted in the central Andes over the last 5–7 years. Descriptive work remains at the core of much research. At a theoretical level, foreign archaeologists are more fully using historical concepts particular to the Andes, while Andean archaeologists are drawing selectively from processual and post-processual approaches. Advances in understanding cultural historical developments are reviewed chronologically, with an emphasis on politics, social formation, ideology, settlement patterns, and economics. The article concludes by examining environment and subsistence, technology and society, and gender.

Latin American Antiquity, 1998

OMPOSING a foreword for a volume honoring Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff is both an honor and an occasion for reflection and sadness. After a first gettogether nearly thirty-five years ago in his office at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, of whose Department of Anthropology he had then just become chair, we met only sporadically. Regrettably this was so especially after 1971, when I moved from Los Angeles to the State University of New York at Albany. Thereafter I missed him almost every time he visited UCLA, where he had become closely associated with the Latin American Center and its longtime director, Johannes Wilbert. But every get-together-including the last one a few months before his untimely death-was over lunch with Wilbert, his good friend and mine (and, incidentally, my mentor in graduate school and since) at the UCLA Faculty Center. Perhaps his death of a heart attack was not untimely but, if death can ever be that, fortunate, for it spared him a more protracted and painful death from cancer of the bladder. Like many other colleagues in the field of shamanic studies, I owe him more than I can ever express. He was an inspiring scholar and colleague; the depth and breadth of his knowledge and insights never failed to amaze. To me personally the viii enormous. Gerardo became a research member of the new Instituto Colombiano de Antropologfa (1953-1960). In 1963, he and Alicia created the first Department of Anthropology in Colombia at the Universidad de Los Andes where he became chairman (1963-1969). In 197 4, Gerardo became Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles, where occasionally he gave lectures and taught classes. The enormous contribution that Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff made to science has been recognized internationally on several occasions. In 1976 he was made a Foreign Associate Member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States; in 1983, a Member of the Academia Real Espanola de Ciencias; and in 1989, a Fellow of the Linnean Society. He was also awarded, in 1975, the Thomas H. Huxley medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. As well, in 1983 he became a Founding Member of the Third World Academy of Sciences. Preface The archaeology and anthropology of Colombia and Latin American have lost a brilliant scholar. Gerardo, however, has left behind a rich legacy of academic achievement and inspiration, as this book demonstrates. The imprint of his scholarly influence can be seen not only in his own students and followers in Colombia but also in the students of Donald Lathrap, five of whom are contributors to this volume. Reichel and Lathrap were friends and colleagues, and admired each other's research. Reichel at times sent students to study with Lathrap at the University of Illinois and in turn helped facilitate the field research ofLathrap's students. Lathrap, the Great Caiman, as his students affectionately referred to him, died in 1990. Now Reichel, the Great Jaguar of the neotropics, has followed his friend, the Great Caiman, but their discoveries, ideas, and teachings live on.

Journal of Cultural Geography, 2010

2010. "The Andes: Personal Reflections on Cultural Change, 1977-2010," Journal of Cultural Geography 27:307-316.

Boletín de Arqueología PUCP, 14: Lenguas y sociedades en el antiguo Perú: hacia un enfoque interdisciplinario., 2011

(RESUMEN EN CASTELLANO MÁS ABAJO) ABSTRACT (IN ENGLISH) This chapter sets out a new proposal for a coherent interdisciplinary prehistory of the Andes, based firstly on a long overdue reexamination of the relationships between the various regional ‘dialects’ within the Quechua language family; and secondly on the search for a far more satisfactory correlation with the archaeological record. Our founding principle is that language expansions do not ‘just happen’. Rather, they happen only for those very same reasons of socio-cultural change that archaeology seeks to describe through its own, independent data. Here is the true link between our disciplines, so we discard outdated, facile equations of ‘language equals culture equals genes’, in favour of the real correlation: that language families necessarily reflect past expansive processes, whose traces should also be clear in the material culture record. This principle is one that we can make use of to identify and assess correspondences between archaeological and linguistic patterns, on three levels: chronology, geography, and above all, causation. Or in other words: when, where and why did particular language expansions occur? In the Andes, in principle this entails that we should look to the Horizons, not the Intermediate Periods, as offering the most natural explanations for the major Quechua and Aymara dispersals. With the Incas too late to account for the time-depth of either family, the most plausible candidate for the first major expansion of Quechua turns out in our view to be the Wari Middle Horizon, with the Chavín Early Horizon more tentatively suggested as behind the earlier spread of the Aymara family. This effectively both upturns the traditional Torero hypothesis, and bears clear implications for the long debate in archaeology as to the nature, duration and extent of ‘Horizons’. RESUMEN (EN CASTELLANO) Ampliando nuestros horizontes: hacia una prehistoria interdisciplinaria de los Andes Este artículo propone una nueva visión de la prehistoria andina, que busca tejer un conjunto más coherente entre las varias disciplinas que intentan entender el pasado precolombino. Se fundamenta, en primer lugar, en una reexaminación, pendiente ya desde décadas, de la clasificación tradicional de las relaciones entre los diversos «dialectos» regionales al interior de la familia lingüística quechua; y, en segundo lugar, en la búsqueda de una correlación mucho más satisfactoria con el registro arqueológico. El nuevo enfoque que aquí proponemos se enraíza en el principio fundamental que si algunas lenguas mayores han logrado dispersarse de manera espectacular, esto no pudo haber ocurrido sin ningún motivo. Más bien, tales expansiones lingüísticas se deben a las mismas razones —es decir, los mismos cambios socioculturales— que la arqueología también busca describir por medio de sus propios datos independientes. Allí radica el auténtico vínculo entre nuestras disciplinas, de manera que podemos descartar las ecuaciones simplistas y obsoletas del estilo «lengua=cultura=genes», en favor de la correlación verdadera: las familias de lenguas reflejan procesos expansivos pasados, cuyos indicios deberían quedar claros también en el registro de la cultura material. Este principio se aprovecha para identificar y evaluar las correspondencias entre los patrones arqueológicos y lingüísticos, y así en tres niveles: la cronología, la geografía y, sobre todo, la causalidad. En otras palabras: ¿cuándo, dónde y porqué se difundieron determinadas lenguas? En los Andes esto implica que en principio debemos ver a los horizontes, y no a los períodos intermedios, como los que ofrecen las explicaciones más naturales para las dispersiones mayores del quechua y el aimara. Ya que el Imperio incaico remonta a una época demasiado tardía las explicaciones de la profundidad temporal de cada familia, es más bien el Horizonte Medio Wari el que se vuelve el candidato más verosímil para haber vehiculizado la primera gran expansión del quechua, según nuestro parecer. Asimismo, aunque de manera más tentativa, se sugiere que el Horizonte Temprano Chavín pudo haber impulsado la dispersión más temprana de la familia aimara. Esto, en efecto, trastoca la hipótesis tradicional de Torero, además de conllevar claras implicancias para el largo debate arqueológico acerca de la naturaleza, duración y extensión de los «horizontes».

Archaeology and Language in the Andes, 2012

This chapter proposes a new and more coherent interdisciplinary prehistory of the Andes, based firstly on a long overdue re-examination of the relationships between the various regional ‘dialects’ within the Quechua language family; and secondly on a more satisfactory correlation with the archaeological record. The founding principle is that language families necessarily reflect past expansive processes, whose traces should also be clear in the archaeological record. It provides a logic by which to assess correspondences between archaeological and linguistic patterns, on the three levels of when, where, and why particular language expansions occurred. In the Andes, the horizons thus offer the most natural explanations for the major Quechua and Aymara dispersals. With the Incas too late for the time-depth of either family, the Wari Middle Horizon emerges as the most plausible candidate for the first major expansion of Quechua, and not (as per traditional linguistic thinking) of the A...

Current …, 2005

Attention to human–environment relationships in the central Andes has a long history. Although the area is not a neat microcosm of the globe, wholly representative of worldwide trends in the archaeology of human–environment interactions, it has been the site of both seminal investigations in archaeology and a substantial body of recent work that investigates themes of broad archaeological relevance. Specifically, central Andean environments have been variously conceived as structuring, modified, and sacred. These approaches to some extent reflect broad trends in archaeology, while also suggesting directions in which the archaeology of human–environment interactions is moving and highlighting archaeology’s relevance to discussions of contemporary human–environment interactions. This article characterizes concepts that are key for describing central Andean environments and considers the ways in which the particular ecology of the central Andes has informed archaeological research in the region. The example of the central Andes highlights the importance of understanding environments as dynamic, considering both geomorphic and anthropogenic contributors to that dynamism, and examining both ecological (“environment”) and ideological (“landscape”) implications of archaeological landscapes.