Beyond the Empire: Living in Cerro de Oro (Dissertation) (original) (raw)

Between ca. AD 500-900, Cerro de Oro, a large monumental settlement located in the lower Cañete valley of coastal Peru, saw the construction of adobe compounds, structures and platforms across an area of 140ha. The traces left by the people who constructed, used, abandoned (ca. AD 500-800), and finally reused (ca. AD 800-900) this settlement form the focus of this investigation. By centering on the inextricable relationships between social practices, inhabited spaces and the things of daily life, I aim to better understand the making and remaking of the Cerro de Oro community. Social practices (encompassing the activities that people engage in every moment of the day: moving, eating, working, playing, and others) are inherently material practices (Voss 2010:4). These practices are fundamentally entwined with their relation with things (Hodder 2012). I propose to study the remains and fragments of the things used by Cerro de Oro people within their own situated social contexts of production, use and discard as a way to understand the entanglements that underpinned daily life. Moreover, the highly constructed nature of the Cerro de Oro landscape has led to an emphasis on space. This built environment was shaped by tall constructions with limited access and restrictive visibility. It is proposed that people made sense of this landscape through their participation in its organization, use, remodeling, abandonment, and reuse. Importantly, the study of the spatial organization and practices people engaged will allow us to understand how the social practices of everyday life articulated with centralized coordination; thus emphasizing the role of daily events in the formation of local historical trajectories. This view highlights a multi-scalar approach that moves beyond the conceptualization of elites as the sole movers behind monumental construction and cultural change; posing its attention on the collective actions of people. Understanding how people lived at Cerro de Oro also entails contextualizing the settlement and its residents within the socially dynamic period that characterized the central and south-central coast during the end of the Early Intermediate Period and the beginning of the Middle Horizon (ca. AD 500-800). The interactions of people, objects, and ideas that characterized this period generated a particularly interactive social sphere which is reflected in a hybridized set of objects that blend regional styles with those of the Wari society. I suggest, exploring this scenario from the ¨local perspective¨ of Cerro de Oro will allow us to avoid reducing local settlements to its relations with larger social groups. Thus, drawing on the results from Cerro de Oro, I consider this culturally dynamic period should be studied from the perspective of the site by focusing on how foreign elements, ceramics and other, were adopted and reconfigured by the people of Cerro de Oro.