During the Late Intermediate period (AD 1100-1470), the lower Cañete Valley of Peru was controlled by the walled Kingdom of Huarco. While inland sites produced irrigated crops, the seaside community of Cerro Azul, 130 km south of Lima, produced fish for the rest of the kingdom.
A majority of laymen, politicians and scholars consciously or subconsciously understand settled living as the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder.
This volume brings together exciting new field data by more than two dozen Andean scholars who came together to honor their friend, colleague, and mentor, Michael E. Moseley. These new studies cover the enormous temporal span of Moseley’s own work from the Preceramic era to the Tiwanaku and Moche states to the Inka empire.
“This work is not so much a book as a database with extensive commentary.”
— L. Richardson, Jr., American Journal of Archaeology, 2005
Studies of Pompeian material culture have traditionally been dominated by art historical approaches, but recently there has been a renewed and burgeoning interest in Pompeian houses for studies of Roman domestic behavior.
One of the most significant differences between the New World’s major areas of high culture is that Mesoamerica had no beasts of burden and wool, while the Andes had both. Four members of the camelid family—wild guanacos and vicuñas, and domestic llamas and alpacas—were native to the Andes.
Warfare, ritual human sacrifice, and the rubber ballgame are the traditional practices through which scholars have most often examined organized violence in the artistic and material records of ancient Mesoamerica and Central America.
Over the last decades, considerable effort has been directed towards the study of early complex societies of northern Peru, and in recent years archaeologists have expressed a strong interest in the art and archaeology of the Moche, Lambayeque and Chimú societies.
The Soconusco region, a narrow strip of the Pacific coast of Mexico and Guatemala, is the location of some of the earliest pottery-using villages of ancient Mesoamerica. Mobile early inhabitants of the area harvested marsh clams in the estuaries, leaving behind vast mounds of shell. With the introduction of pottery and the establishment of permanent villages (from 1900 B.C.), use of the resource-rich estuary changed.
In AD 1438 a battle took place outside the city of Cuzco that changed the course of South American history. The Chanka, a powerful ethnic group from the Andahuaylas region, had begun an aggressive program of expansion. Conquering a host of smaller polities, their army had advanced well inside the territory of their traditional rival, the Inca.
The Incas carried out some of the most dramatic ceremonies known to us from ancient times. Groups of people walked hundreds of miles across arid and mountainous terrain to perform them on mountains over 20,000 feet high. The most important offerings made during these pilgrimages involved human sacrifices (capacochas).