Buildings for the Dead: Constructing Social Order and Concealing Social Change in the Late Prehispanic Andes

Matthew C. Velasco PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University

Gamble Room, Rush Rhees Library

Sponsored by the Archaeology, Technology and Historical Structures Program. Refreshments will be provided.

Overview

In the Andes, the centuries prior to Inka imperial expansion were marked by warfare and political upheaval, but they were also a time of cultural revolution that saw the genesis of new peoples, polities, and practices. In the absence of the State, corporate kinship groups reconstituted authority in the mummified bodies of their respective ancestors, who were housed in accessible and prominently placed sepulchers, commonly known as chullpas. Although chullpas, along with hilltop fortifications, are often seen as symptomatic of a fragmented social landscape, few researchers have explicitly tested this assumption, and even fewer have analyzed the remains of those who dwelled in these mortuary buildings. In this talk, I provide a finer-grained accounting of one such burial tradition, drawing from my recent research in the Colca Valley of southern Peru. I juxtapose architectural and radiometric data on the long-term development of a multi-level burial complex with bioarchaeological data that speak to the social identities of the deceased, and how they dynamically transformed over time. Challenging functionalist assumptions regarding burials and boundaries in the late prehispanic Andes, I argue that the elaboration of ancestral authority through iterative building practices worked to mask emerging social differences as local elites came into contact with the encroaching Inka.

View the flyer (pdf)