Archives in Clay: The Styles and Stories of Wari Ceramic Artists.

Boletin de Arqueologia PUCP, 2014

This contribution surveys the emergence and character of the Middle Horizon in Peru's north highlands. It centers on Ancash department, a region with a rich and unique archaeological record for contextualizing interaction during the period. My discussion begins by detailing the sequence and variability of interregional interaction in Ancash Department during the latter half of the 1st millennium AD. Then I will examine the general implications of the available data -especially architecture, long distance goods and ceramic style -with a view to identify current difficulties and to encourage future problem-oriented investigations. Two terms help contextualize the cultural dynamism of the Middle Horizon: bundling (purposeful acquisition and clustering of objects from long-distance) and vector (a distinct cultural predisposition facilitating interaction). Although there is evidence of Wari contact before imperial expansion, trade interaction increased dramatically during the early Middle Horizon, focused on 'bundled' patterns of acquisition. These were followed by new exchange orientations and stylistic emulation. There is very little evidence to indicate territorial control, but Wari strategies highlighted the rich areas of western Ancash, while apparently de-emphasising Eastern Ancash. Religion and prestige economies appear to have been the most common factors for local engagements with Wari culture.

As a result of archaeological fieldwork of the past two decades in Cuzco, Peru, Inca origins can now be viewed from a perspective significantly different from the traditional ethnohistoric analyses of the postconquest Spanish chronicles. It now appears that the formation of the Inca polity resulted from a uniquely fortuitous set of conditions that resulted in what Bennet Bronson ( chapter 9) terms "template regeneration." The Inca heartland was strategically located midway between two extraordinarily longlived and powerful early empires. Both the Wari and the Tiwanaku empire exerted great influence on the Cuzco region and continued to do so even in the period after their collapse. Elements of Wari statecraft are reflected in the material culture-especially the architecture and ceramics-of the succeeding culture and seem to have survived in situ in the Cuzco Valley. Influence from the Tiwanaku empire probably came indirectly before the Wari conquest of Cuzco and later with a migration of elites from the Titicaca basin to Cuzco after the fall of both Tiwanaku and Wari. This post-Tiwanaku influence is manifested in the intrusion of a new elite burial tradition and its accompanying architecture and ceramics. The subsequent Inca state was the product of peoples able to use and build upon the social tools and techniques of these earlier empires for their own purposes, employing surviving elements of statecraft and social organization that persisted throughout the Late Intermediate period.

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2001

This article tests a model for the political economy of the Wari Empire (AD 600-1000) of Peru. This model divides the empire into core and periphery zones. In the core, Wari political economy was organized to extract surplus agricultural production to feed the capital. In the periphery, the Wari strove to extract prestige goods. We suggest that there is a strong relationship between where the empire chose to locate its centers in the periphery and the political complexity of the local population in which the center was placed. We argue that in areas of low political organization sites should be located near the geographic center of a population. These sites will tend to function as local administrative centers geared toward the organization and exploitation of the area's wealth potential. In areas with more complex political organization sites should be located on the margins of a population. These sites should have functioned as gateway centers controlling, or at least profiting from, interregional exchange. Our model was systematically tested through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The results suggest that much of the variability found in Wari site placement in the periphery can be explained by differences in local sociopolitical complexity. FIG. 5. Rank order plot of valley area. The units for the y axis are square kilometers. Valleys with complex pre-Wari political organization are represented by horizontal lines while valleys with simple pre-Wari political organization are shown with diagonal hatching. POLITYWIDE ANALYSIS OF WARI POLITICAL ECONOMY

Pp 41-63 in: Visions of Tiwanaku, Alexei Vranich and Charles Stanish, editors. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Los Angeles. , 2013

Bulletin de l’Institut français d’études andines, 2012

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A conversão dos povos nativos às religiões mundiais não é um fenômeno recente, como sabemos, embora só há pouco tempo os antropólogos tenham começado a se interessar verdadeiramente pelo tema e a nos oferecer etnografias detalhadas de casos particulares. Esse desinteresse tem motivos diversos, sendo os mais evidentes, segundo os autores que se preocuparam em explicá-lo, o modelo malinowskiano do selvagem primevo e a rivalidade histórica entre antropólogos e missionários (Robbins 2004; Harding 2001). No caso do cristianismo, a situação se complica pelo fato de ser esta a fé majoritária dos países de origem da maioria dos antropólogos: o interesse pelo exótico não é compatível com o estudo de nativos cristianizados (Robbins 2007). Como mostrou Barker (1992:145-147) em um estudo sobre o lugar do cristianismo na etnografia melanésia, até os anos 1990 os etnógrafos limitavam-se a mencionar o assunto no prefácio ou em um capítulo de seus trabalhos, quando não o ignoravam completamente, mesmo lidando com povos fortemente cristianizados, como era o caso na Melanésia, em que 85% da população se declaravam cristãos. A situação não é diferente na América do Sul. Ali, como em outras áreas etnográficas (ver, por exemplo, Comaroff & Comaroff 1991 para a África do Sul; Laugrand 1997 e 2006; Burch 1994; e Fienup-Riordan 1991 para o Ártico), o cristianismo foi desde o início parte do processo de conquista e dominação, conseqüência da associação que os representantes do Estado sempre fizeram -e o fazem ainda hoje -entre civilizar e converter. No Brasil, desde a entrada em cena dos jesuítas, cinqüenta anos após a chegada de Cabral em 1500, até os primeiros tempos da implantação da República, passando pelo Brasil Império, a relação entre o Estado e os índios sempre

This article is an ethnographic essay on the notion of an 'ontological turn' , taken here in its literal sense of ontological change. It explores a specific sociocosmological transformation – one resulting from the conversion of an Amazonian people, the Wari' , to Christianity – via the concept of ontology. The central question here concerns the relationship between an Amazonian animist/perspectivist ontology and the naturalism characteristic of Christian-Western thought. Through a critical reading of the notion of ontological change advanced by Descola (2013) in Beyond Nature and Culture, the article aims to show that the transformation experienced by the Wari' with the arrival of Christianity can be described neither as a linear transition between ontologies, nor as the result of the foregrounding of conceptions or kinds of relationship previously found in an encompassed form. The separation between humans and animals, and the constitution of an inner self typical of Christian naturalism, are becoming gradually absorbed into the Wari' world now but were non-existent and inconceivable in their traditional universe. An examination of the translation choices made by the Evangelical missionaries from the New Tribes Mission and the apprehension of these ideas by the Wari' suggests a complex and non-linear transition between the two ontologies.

The Wari empire (AD 600–1000) deployed a variety of strategies to consolidate its provinces in Middle Horizon Peru. One strategy may have been building imperial sites in places with large visual magnitudes, which are attrac- tive to empires because they are more defensible, they are suitably located for direct and implied surveillance, and they project a visually-dominant presence on the landscape. In the Sondondo Valley, Peru, the Wari empire made a significant investment of labor and resources in the construction of terraces, roads, and five imperial sites. The viewsheds of these sites are compared to those of 20 non-imperial sites, 495 randomly-placed individual sites, and 99 randomly-placed groups of five sites each. Parametric and non-parametric comparisons reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference between viewsheds. Imperial sites had significantly larger and better-coordinated viewsheds, as estimated from overlap and coverage indices. These results support the argu- ment that imperial agents' site-placement decisions considered the benefits of locations with large viewsheds. From these sites, the empire's representatives effectively advanced imperial goals for two and half centuries. Similar factors may have been salient in other imperial settings, so this approach may help explore site-placement decisions in other regions.

2014

Miłosz Giersz, 2014, Pilgrim Flask with Personage on Raft, in: Castillo de Huarmey. El mausoleo imperial wari, edited by Miłosz Giersz and Cecilia Pardo, Museo de Arte de Lima, Lima