This research investigates how communities reorganize during periods of widespread social, economic, and religious transformation. In particular, the study traces the process through which the people of Hualcayán, an ancient ritual, settlement, and agricultural complex in highland Ancash, Peru, forged a new kind of community during one of the most transformative but little understood periods in Andean prehistory: the disintegration of the ChavÃn religious and political network (900â500 BC) and the subsequent emergence of more localized Recuay communities and polities (AD 1â700).
The study examines this process of community formation by focusing on how people at Hualcayán reorganized their ritual and economic practices to produce new relationships to each other, local lands, and local resources. Specifically, it investigates how diverse kinds of collective labor and ritual practicesâespecially building, performance, food production, and ritual consumptionâintersected to assemble the Hualcayán community through time.
The study reveals that the Recuay emergence was a bottom-up process of local innovation and community reorganization. A new community was built when local people formed corporate groups that were organized through the combined labor of conducting shared rituals, growing and sharing foods, and building shared spaces. Paleobotanical, artifact, and architectural evidence shows that after people decommissioned their ChavÃn temple, groups began to build separate spaces that were used for both ritual and agricultural processing and storage. These ritual-storage compounds were dispersed within agricultural terraces, which suggests that local people began to strongly emphasize links between their groupâs ritual practices and the collective labor needed to produce food and infrastructure.
These results contribute to the anthropological study of communities. First, they reveal several how collective economic practices such as agricultural intensification supports ritual practice and vice versa. Second, they support the need to explore communities as internally diverse assemblages of people, things, and places. Finally, they reveal how both widespread social and political transformations do not occur through elite innovations alone but through changes in the everyday labor of people who work and celebrate together.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-12072017-121210 |
| Date | 07 December 2017 |
| Creators | Bria, Rebecca Elizabeth |
| Contributors | Tom D. Dillehay |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-12072017-121210/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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