Wari state control of camelid caravan traffic between the coast and highlands of the southern Nasca region, Peru

Bibliographic Data

ID20069505
AuthorsM J Edwards (0000-0002-7093-1893, corresponding author)
Year2021
Pages93-105
Publication date2021-11-02
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueCaravans in Global Perspective (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.4324/9781003229810-6
OpenAlexW3209668984
ISBN9781003229810
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Transport of burden across the rugged Andean landscape has been a challenge to the region’s people for millennia. That the domestication of New World camelids and the development of agro-pastoral economies in the Andes aided in easing this challenge is well known. More challenging is the task of discerning the historicity of Andean caravans – especially when much of it is hidden in the preliterate past. In short, how was this seemingly timeless feature of Andean society and culture shaped, adapted, and transformed through time and how did it, in turn, influence the development of other social institutions? This chapter contributes a relatively synchronic data point to this question in providing an archaeological example of caravans from the Americas to this volume and complicating the picture of Andean caravans typically drawn from ethnography and ethnohistory as immutable features of a timeless culture. I present data from my ongoing research in the headwater valleys of the Nasca River on the western Andean slope in the southern portion of the Peruvian province of Ayacucho. The data are primarily archaeological and cohere within the frame of political economy, specifically the institutionalization of trade and its role in empire-building

Archaeology · Domestication · Empire · Ethnography · Ethnohistory · Ethnology · Geography · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Indigenous Cultures and History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Ecology

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