South American Archaeology Seminar: London

Programme

10.00 am  Coffee/ Registration

• 10.30: Rosabella Alvarez-Calderon  (UCL) Huaca and City on the Northern Coast of Peru: Modern challenges and possibilities in the cultural urban landscape of Trujillo and Chan Chan
• 11.10: Andrea Martínez-Carrasco  (UCL) Who manufactured Inka Urpus and shallow dishes in southern Qullasuyu? Technological characterisation of late pottery in the Aconcagua Valley (Central Chile)
• 11.50: Sabine Hyland (University of St. Andrews)  Personhood in Andean Khipus: Human Figurines in the Khipus of Rapaz and Jucul

12.30-1.40pm Lunch

• 1.40: Manuel Arroyo-Kalin (UCL & PARINÃ team) The Northwest Amazon Intercultural Archaeological Programme (PARINÃ): results and perspectives
• 2.20: Nicholas E. Brown (UEA / Yale) Headwater Heritage Landscapes of the Chavin Andes-Amazon

3.00-3.30pm Tea

• 3.30: Haagen D. Klaus (George Mason University) Lambayeque Valley Biohistory: Reconstructing Life and Death from the Era of Early Social Complexity to the Spanish Colonization of Northern Coastal Peru (1500 BCE-1750 CE) 
• 4.10: Camila Alday (University of Cambridge) The Emergence of Cotton (Gossypium Barbadense) as a Textile Plant

Attendees (including speakers) will be asked to pay £10.00 towards the cost of coffee, tea & lunch.  Please register for your place via the link above.

The next meeting date is likely to be: Saturday 17 May 2025. If you would like to give a talk at a future South American Archaeology Seminar or for further information please contact Bill Sillar (b.sillar@ucl.ac.uk)

Organisers: Bill Sillar, Andrea Martinez Carrasco, & Cristian Gonzalez Rodriguez 

Images:

• Top: Huaca Loro East Tomb funerary mask (Credit: Haagen D. Klaus)
• Right: Wooden bar khipu at the Krannert Art Museum in the U of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne (Credit: Sabine Hyland)

Abstracts

Huaca and City on the Northern Coast of Peru: Modern challenges and possibilities in the cultural urban landscape of Trujillo and Chan Chan
Rosabella Alvarez-Calderon  UCL Institute of Archaeology
rosabella.silva-santisteban.24@ucl.ac.uk

The development of cities in Peru after the Spanish conquest in the mid-16th century treated the territory as empty land to be developed, leading to the destruction, neglect and invisibility of many prehispanic sites, known as huacas. While some survive as tourist sites, most are vulnerable, seen as ambiguous spaces competing with modern needs like housing and infrastructure. This issue is critical in Lima, where a third of Peru’s population lives, but is equally significant in regional cities like Trujillo, home to major archaeological sites such as Chan Chan, which face pressures from urban development, informal settlements, climate change and cyclical disruptive events such as El Niño. This presentation, based on a study visit facilitated by Peru’s University Network, explores the conflicts, challenges and possibilities surrounding the huaca-modern city relationship in Trujillo, particularly Chan Chan’s interaction with speculative development, informal neighbourhoods, and the surrounding landscape. It also shares insights from a design workshop with local architecture students, highlighting their perspectives on heritage and urban growth.

Who manufactured Inka Urpus and shallow dishes in southern Qullasuyu? Technological characterisation of late pottery in the Aconcagua Valley (Central Chile)
Andrea Martínez-Carrasco  UCL Institute of Archaeology
andrea.carrasco.19@ucl.ac.uk

Around 1400 AD, the Aconcagua Valley was incorporated into the Qullasuyu, the southern provincial region of the Empire. The Inka had to employ different annexation strategies, which included creating a range of material culture with Inca-style forms and decorations. Within these imperial artefacts, pottery was used extensively in provinces’ political and religious festivities, like the study area, where new ceramic forms and decorations appeared in addition to or mixed with local traditions. This late pottery was accompanied by widespread Diaguita decorative motifs previously associated with traditions from the semi-arid, located in the north of the Aconcagua valley. This paper presents the preliminary results of ongoing research which seeks to identify the extent and nature of Inka control or influence over the production of Inka-style pottery in the Aconcagua Valley and evaluate the role the ‘foreign’ Diaguita might have played in this mediation. The ceramic assemblage from before and during the Inka presence is analysed technologically to define the possible origins of materials (local and non-local), pastes and pigments recipes, and the manufacturing process. The results are discussed to infer the existence of control at the different stages of Inka-style vessel production, what type of agency could have existed in the local communities, and if pottery specialists from outside the region were influenced.

Personhood in Andean Khipus: Human Figurines in the Khipus of Rapaz and Jucul
Sabine Hyland University of St. Andrews
sph@st-andrews.ac.uk

Khipus frequently are characterised as the only non-iconographic writing system. Recently, however, I have argued that khipus possess many iconic elements in which there is “some non-arbitrary, iconic mapping between form and meaning” (Perniss, Thompson, and Vigliocco 2010). This presentation explores one kind of iconic feature on Andean khipus: 3D human figurines.  These human images have been viewed as decorative elements whose meaning is not an inherent part of the khipu’s message. Based on ethnographic analogy with khipus in the Central Andean communities of Rapaz and Jucul, this presentation suggests that such human images are not adornments or illustrations, but instead play an important visual role in vitalising relations between humans and ancestral or non-human beings.  

Headwater Heritage Landscapes of the Chavin Andes-Amazon
Nicholas E. Brown  Visiting Fellow, University of East Anglia, Archaeology Research Associate, Yale
nicholas.e.brown@aya.yale.edu

To appreciate the ancient worldview shared by multi-cultural participants in the Chavin phenomenon, it is essential to consider the wider heritage landscapes within which sites like Chavin de Huantar were emplaced and acquired centrality. A deeper understanding of the past significance of Chavin artworks can be gained through relational analyses of the hydrology and ecology around stone monuments. Drawing on excavation and survey data from mountaintop sites like Chawin Punta, Kunturay, and Kanchan Huanca in the east-central highland Pasco region of Peru, this presentation explores how Chavin rituals of carving and painting living rock served to commemorate Andean headwater springs where Amazonian rivers are born. The seasonality of animals depicted in these high-altitude artistic interventions can shed new light on the calendrics of mountain worship that forged an interconnected cosmovision across the Chavin Andes-Amazon during the 1st millennium B.C.

The Northwest Amazon Intercultural Archaeological Programme (PARINÃ): results and perspectives
Manuel Arroyo-Kalin UCL Institute of Archaeology (& the PARINÃ team)
m.arroyo-kalin@ucl.ac.uk

Between 2019 and 2023 the Northwest Amazon Intercultural Archaeology Programme (PARINÃ) – a  research collaboration between Rio Negro specialists (archaeologists, anthropologists/historians) based in universities, research institutions, and museums – spearheaded a research project to investigate Indigenous Heritage Making as an intercultural process in the Northwest Amazon, Brazil. Focussing on the upper Negro River basin, and supported by partnerships with different civil society organisations, the PARINÃ developed research activity with Indigenous connoisseurs, Indigenous researchers, and aspiring Indigenous archaeologists. Through this activity, the project identified the location of previously-uncharted archaeological sites in the region, conducted archaeological excavations in the city of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, systematised published and unpublished ethnographic and archaeological information for the broader Negro and Uaupés basin, and showcased its initial results through an Exhibition open to the public that also meaningfully engaged local indigenous organisations. This paper presents the premises and broad outline of the project’s trajectory and examines some of the challenges encountered and lying ahead, lessons learnt, and goals that remain to be achieved in order to implement an intercultural research agenda focussed on Indigenous history of the region.

Lambayeque Valley Biohistory: Reconstructing Life and Death from the Era of Early Social Complexity to the Spanish Colonization of Northern Coastal Peru (1500 BCE-1750 CE)
Haagen D. Klaus George Mason University, USA.
hklaus@gmu.edu

Questions surrounding the origins, organization, and fates of complex Andean societies have long guided Andean archaeology. Until recently, human remains and mortuary patterns remained a relatively untapped source of information. This presentation provides an overview of the key findings of the Lambayeque Valley Biohistory Project over the last 23 years involving the collaboration of more than three dozen scholars from eight countries. The project employs multiple lines of bioarchaeological, funerary pattern, and contextual data to reconstruct the human experiences produced by the rise of states and empires, intensive irrigation agriculture, and most impactful of all, European conquest of the Western Hemisphere which forever altered human biodiversity, cultures, and ecology on a global scale. Human remains (n= 3,021 individuals) have been studied to date from 28 sites in the Lambayeque Valley Complex on the north coast of Peru. The sample spans Early Cupisnique to Late Colonial periods, illustrating life stories of individual people to entire regional histories. Findings demonstrate those who lived in the Formative era possessed the best health and highest quality diets, though incipient forms of socioeconomic inequality began to manifest in material culture and burial patterns. By the Middle to Late Moche sequence an “epidemiological bifurcation” is observed. Late pre-Hispanic elite individuals appear to have enjoyed largely healthy lives and high-quality diets. Most biological stress, disease, and morbidity was increasingly concentrated among non-elite social strata who formed a Muchik ethnic group. Outside of human sacrifice, little evidence of violence is found. When the Spanish colonized the north coast, a regional decline in health was long underway. Heterogeneous disease landscapes persisted but took on new forms. Some Muchik descendants enduring increased suffering while others evaded the most negative impacts of conquest. At the same time, multiple syncretic local cultures emerged and appear entwined with a measurable reconfiguration of the Lambayeque gene pool. This work also hopes to demonstrate the theoretical, methodological, and practical benefits of a holistic form of bioarchaeology built from cross-contextual and diachronic perspectives seeking humanized reconstructions of the Andean past.

The Emergence of Cotton (Gossypium Barbadense) as a Textile Plant
Camila Alday McDonald Institute, University of Cambridge
cca28@cam.ac.uk

Plants as textile raw materials provide a window into understanding cultural dynamics on the Pacific coast. Cotton (Gossypium barbadense), whose origin dates back around 6000 years ago in South America, becomes an essential textile resource for the production of nets, fishing artefacts, and fabrics. When cotton is introduced into plant fibre technologies, it triggers not only a transition from an immediate-return economy of wild plants such as Typha sp., Scirpus sp., and Asclepias sp. to a cultivation economy of G. barbadense, but also becomes a resource that generates new dependencies. Understanding cotton as a catalyst for change in ecological, technological, and social relationships involves reinterpreting this plant as a protagonist in the social dynamics of the Preceramic Period. In this paper, I discuss how the initial use of cotton promoted dynamics of ecological, economic, and therefore social dependencies during the Preceramic Period on the Pacific coast. This article is an invitation to reflect on the contribution of cotton for the study of early textile dynamics in the Andean region. More importantly, cotton offers a unique example for interrogating the link between the origins of plant cultivation and the formation of textile-labour in South America.

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