Pins and powders, pots and pendants
Valuable parts and durable dispositions in an ancient Andean burial offering at Pashash (AD 300-600, Ancash, Peru)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4278693 |
|---|---|
| Authors | George Lau (0000-0002-0089-3625, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 83 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 99-125 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0277-1322 • E-ISSN: 2445-0367 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/734289 |
| OpenAlex | W4410883920 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 21 |
This essay investigates an ancient burial offering in Peru’s north highlands. It focuses on its contents and how its material forms and associated properties facilitated and oriented human engagements and understandings (see Hodder 2012, 48–50; Knappett 2005, chap. 4; Chapman 2000; Gell 1998; Gosden 2005). By reconstructing how they may have worked and signified together for an archaeological culture, the study moves the focus away from a single artifact, artwork, or iconography to the overall material corpus, and to the formal relations between objects and their contexts, in space and through time. The study draws from archaeological investigations at Pashash, a monumental hilltop center of the Recuay culture in Pallasca province, Ancash Department, north central Peru (Grieder 1978; Lau 2011a). The context comprises a rich noble burial, to which at least four discrete caches of offerings were dedicated. The arrangements of their contents reveal distinct approaches to humans and things, based on part-whole relations. The offering practices were recursive and multiscalar (e.g., paired, groups, smaller, sequential, additional). The materials, I argue, helped articulate new social understandings emerging in the ancient Andean world during the first millennium AD—namely, that the offering and its components were cultural expressions of a kin-based collectivity and ancestor-led polity
Art · Polymer science · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Materials Science
Palabras clave de la sociedad y la cultura incas
House forms and Recuay culture
The Archaeology of Dual Organization in Andean South America
Don’t Fall Asleep by a Boulder
Female Supernaturals in Ancient Peru
Bioarchaeology of human skeletons from an elite tomb at Pacopampa in Peru’s northern highlands
To Unite and Divide
What Do Objects Want
Cinnabar traditions across the ancient Central Andes
Patrimoine vivant
Pashas y la cosmovisión andina
How the huacas Were
The Body of Meaning in Chavin Art
Early imperialism in the Andes
Creating Context in Andean Cultures
The work of surfaces
Peirce and Archaeology
Semiotics and the social analysis of material things
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |