Flourishing from A.D. 1 to 700, the Recuay inhabited lands in northern Peru just below the imposing glaciers of the highest mountain chain in the tropics. Thriving on an economy of high-altitude crops and camelid herding, they left behind finely made artworks and grand palatial buildings with an unprecedented aesthetic and a high degree of technical sophistication. In this first in-depth study of these peoples, George Lau situates the Recuay within the great diversification of cultural styles associated with the Early Intermediate Period, provides new and significant evidence to evaluate models of social complexity, and offers fresh theories about life, settlement, art, and cosmology in the high Andes. Lau crafts a nuanced social and historical model in order to evaluate the record of Recuay developments as part of a wider Andean prehistory. He analyzes the rise and decline of Recuay groups as well as their special interactions with the Andean landscape. Their coherence was expressed as shared culture, community, and corporate identity, but Lau also reveals its diversity through time and space in order to challenge the monolithic characterizations of Recuay society pervasive in the literature today. Many of the innovations in Recuay culture, revealed for the first time in this landmark volume, left a lasting impact on Andean history and continue to have relevance today. The author highlights the ways that material things intervened in ancient social and political life, rather than being merely passive reflections of historical change, to show that Recuay public art, exchange, technological innovations, warfare, and religion offer key insights into the emergence of social hierarchy and chiefly leadership and the formation, interaction, and later dissolution of large discrete polities. By presenting Recuay artifacts as fundamentally social in the sense of creating and negotiating relations among persons, places, and things, he recognizes in the complexities of the past an enduring order and intelligence that shape the contours of history.

Examines the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire in 1532 and how European and indigenous life ways became intertwined, producing a new and constantly evolving hybrid colonial order in the Andes.

This comprehensive reference offers an authoritative overview of Andean lifeways. It provides valuable historical context, and demonstrates the relevance of learning about the Andes in light of contemporary events and debates. The volume covers the ecology and pre-Columbian history of the region, and addresses key themes such as cosmology, aesthetics, gender and household relations, modes of economic production, exchange, and consumption, postcolonial legacies, identities, political organization and movements, and transnational interconnections. With over 40 essays by expert contributors that highlight the breadth and depth of Andean worlds, this is an essential resource for students and scholars alike.

There is widespread acknowledgement among anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnobotanists, as well as researchers in related disciplines that specific foods and cuisines are linked very strongly to the formation and maintenance of cultural identity and ethnicity. Strong associations of foodways with culture are particularly characteristic of South American Andean cultures. Food and drink convey complex social and cultural meanings that can provide insights into regional interactions, social complexity, cultural hybridization, and ethnogenesis. This edited volume presents novel and creative anthropological, archaeological, historical, and iconographic research on Andean food and culture from diverse temporal periods and spatial settings. The breadth and scope of the contributions provides original insights into a diversity of topics, such as the role of food in Andean political economies, the transformation of foodways and cuisines through time, and ancient iconographic representations of plants and animals that were used as food. Thus, this volume is distinguished from most of the published literature in that specific foods, cuisines, and culinary practices are the primary subject matter through which aspects of Andean culture are interpreted.

A sophisticated, state-of-the-art study of the remaking of Christianity by indigenous societies, Words and Worlds Turned Around reveals the manifold transformations of Christian discourses in the colonial Americas. The book surveys how Christian messages were rendered in indigenous languages; explores what was added, transformed, or glossed over; and ends with an epilogue about contemporary Nahuatl Christianities. In eleven case studies drawn from eight Amerindian languages—Nahuatl, Northern and Valley Zapotec, Quechua, Yucatec Maya, K'iche' Maya, Q'eqchi' Maya, and Tupi—the authors address Christian texts and traditions that were repeatedly changed through translation—a process of “turning around” as conveyed in Classical Nahuatl. Through an examination of how Christian terms and practices were made, remade, and negotiated by both missionaries and native authors and audiences, the volume shows the conversion of indigenous peoples as an ongoing process influenced by what native societies sought, understood, or accepted. The volume features a rapprochement of methodologies and assumptions employed in history, anthropology, and religion and combines the acuity of of methodologies drawn from philology and historical linguistics with the contextualizing force of the ethnohistory and social history of Spanish and Portuguese America. Contributors: Claudia Brosseder, Louise M. Burkhart, Mark Christensen, John F. Chuchiak IV, Abelardo de la Cruz, Gregory Haimovich, Kittiya Lee, Ben Leeming, Julia Madajczak, Justyna Olko, Frauke Sachse, Garry Sparks

This book argues that a careful consideration of Andean conceptions of powerful places is critical not only to understanding Andean political and religious history but to rethinking sociological theories on landscapes more generally.

Ancient Alterity in the Andes is the first major treatment on ancient alterity: how people in the past regarded others. At least since the 1970s, alterity has been an influential concept in different fields, from art history, psychology and philosophy, to linguistics and ethnography. Having gained steam in concert with postmodernism’s emphasis on self-reflection and discourse, it is especially significant now as a framework to understand the process of ‘writing’ and understanding the Other: groups, cultures and cosmologies. This book showcases this concept by illustrating how people visualised others in the past, and how it coloured their engagements with them, both physically and cognitively. Alterity has yet to see sustained treatment in archaeology due in great part to the fact that the archaeological record is not always equipped to inform on the subject. Like its kindred concepts, such as identity and ethnicity, alterity is difficult to observe also because it can be expressed at different times and scales, from the individual, family and village settings, to contexts such as nations and empires. It can also be said to ‘reside’ just as well in objects and individuals, as it may in a technique, action or performance. One requires a relevant, holistic data set and multiple lines of evidence. Ancient Alterity in the Andes provides just that by focusing on the great achievements of the ancient Andes during the first millennium AD, centred on a Precolumbian culture, known as Recuay (AD 1-700). Using a new framework of alterity, one based on social others (e.g., kinsfolk, animals, predators, enemies, ancestral dead), the book rethinks cultural relationships with other groups, including the Moche and Nasca civilisations of Peru’s coast, the Chavín cult, and the later Wari, the first Andean empire. In revealing little known patterns in Andean prehistory the book illuminates the ways that archaeologists, in general, can examine alterity through the existing record. Ancient Alterity in the Andes is a substantial boon to the analysis and writing of past cultures, social systems and cosmologies and an important book for those wishing to understand this developing concept in archaeological theory.