Life, Death, and Burial during the Inca Occupation of Farfan on Peru's North Coast, Sections I, II (original) (raw)
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Andean Past Monograph 2 Section IV appendices bibliography, 2020
This is Section III, the appendices, and the bibliography of a report on Inca burials excavated at the site of Farfán on Peru’s North Coast. Farfán was excavated by Carol J. Mackey from 1999 until 2004. Bioarchaeologist Andrew J. Nelson analyzed the human remains recovered. An important provincial center, Farfán was occupied successively by the , Chimu, Lambayeque and Inca cultures. This monograph postulates that female Inca burials at Farfán were those of aqlla, the “chosen women”, virgins who played important roles variously as weavers of fine cloth and brewers of chicha, as high status brides of important men, as religious officiants, and as the victims of human sacrifices. Farfán is one of only three sites where aqlla burials have been scientifically excavated. Tomb architecture is revealed and grave goods are illustrated and analyzed. Included is a complete inventory of ceramics recovered and analyses of textiles, camelid bones, and isotopic studies.
Andean Past Monograph 2 (Section III), 2020
This is Section III of a report on Inca burials excavated at the site of Farfán on Peru’s North Coast. Farfán was excavated by Carol J. Mackey from 1999 until 2004. Bioarchaeologist Andrew J. Nelson analyzed the human remains recovered. An important provincial center, Farfán was occupied successively by the Chimu, Lambayeque, and Inca cultures. This monograph postulates that female Inca burials at Farfán were those of aqlla, the “chosen women”, virgins who played important roles variously as weavers of fine cloth and brewers of chicha, as high status brides of important men, as religious officiants, and as the victims of human sacrifices. Farfán is one of only three sites where aqlla burials have been scientifically excavated. Tomb architecture is revealed and grave goods are illustrated and analyzed. Included is a complete inventory of ceramics recovered and analyses of textiles, camelid bones, and isotopic studies.
Latin American Antiquity, 2021
The collapse of the Tiwanaku state around AD 1000 resulted in dramatic changes in the areas of its former colonies such as the Moquegua Valley, which featured the largest Tiwanaku communities outside the Altiplano. The inhabitants of these former colonies were forced to relocate to the areas north of Moquegua, including the Tambo River estuary (Arequipa Department, Province of Islay). This relocation has been confirmed at La Pampilla 1, where a large graveyard featuring funerary contexts of the postcollapse communities of Tiwanaku-Timulaca was found, with a calibrated 14 C date between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries AD. In this article we discuss the results of excavations and analyses conducted at the La Pampilla 1 graveyard, the first systematically researched Tiwanaku site in the Tambo Valley: these findings confirm the existence of a relatively large, terminal-phase Tiwanaku population, represented by Tumilaca funerary contexts.
Mortuary remains within an archaeological context can illuminate the social and political aspects not only of the individual(s) buried, but also of the living who interred them. Although this is so, a consensus has not been reached in regard to the following questions: how can we determine the social identity of the living that interred the dead? What are the implications of the living-dead interaction, and how do mortuary practices alter social memory in order to fit political needs? This thesis constitutes an initial attempt to answer these questions while examining pre-internment mortuary practices, and associated ideologies regarding the afterlife based on data collected during the 2015 field season by members of the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica Panquilma (PIAP), under the direction of Dr. Enrique Lopéz-Hurtado, of the Instituto de Estudios de Peruanos Programa de Investigación. This project is centered at the Late Intermediate Period (LIP) to Late Horizon (LH) secondary Ychsma site of Panquilma in the mid-Valley of the Lurín River Valley, Central Coast of Peru. This research aims to determine the time period and significance of a puzzling structure that was excavated at the cemetery’s margin at Panquilma in order to determine the building’s potential role in ancestral veneration practices of the lesser-elites. Upon first glance this structure appeared to have a layout of a household structure but was located near the cemetery, far from the residential center of the site. A wide array and substantial quantities of exotic and/or ritual items such as sheet metal fragments, colorful bird feathers, orpiment, and manuports, as well as Spondylus sp. and Nectandra sp. beads were discovered within this building suggesting non-mundane or non-domestic usages. Was this structure used in the preparation and care of the funerary bundles? Did it house an important figure (e.g., a shaman) in both their life and death? Or did it serve as a workshop for preparing ritual items? In an effort to ascertain the significance of this structure, this thesis examines the aforementioned remains as well as its relative location and the results from portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) analyses of some of the excavated artifacts in order to provide a deeper understanding of mortuary practices at Panquilma and thus the Ychsma’s concept of and interaction with the dead on the Central Coast of Peru. The exact function of this structure cannot be concretely stated, but the diverse lines of evidence present appear to favor the first hypothesis in which this structure functioned as a funerary preparation area, but principally for elite and/or ritually significant bundle(s). This was ascertained due to the numerous exotic and/or ritual artifacts found associated within this Inkaic structure that likely served a ritualistic function in regard to water and agricultural fertility as well as serving as indirect evidence for elite ancestral veneration practices.
Over 30 funerary bundles were excavated in 2005 from a large chamber tomb at the prehispanic religious center of Pachacamac on the central coast of Peru. The largest and most elaborate bundle was found in the innermost part of the tomb, tightly surrounded by other bundles. We hypothesized that this bundle contained the deceased leader of a social group whose members collectively cared for their ancestor’s bundle (for example, by rewrapping it) and continued to use the tomb to inter deceased individuals from subsequent generations. We tested this hypothesis by dating samples from different layers of the wrapping materials and soft tissue from the bodies and conducting a Bayesian analysis of the resultant dates. We determined carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios in the diet of the interred individuals to correct for marine reservoir effects. Our findings suggest that (1) rewrapping did not occur; (2) the tomb was used for over 500 years starting at cal A.D. 1000; and (3) existing bundles were reshuffled each time new bundles were introduced. Overall, diverse lines of evidence indicate that the tomb had a complex use history and contained individuals with diverse geographical and social origins. This challenges conventional thinking about the social and chronological significance of coexisting bundles in large tombs. Pachacamac fue un afamado centro religioso prehispánico localizado en la costa central del Perú. En el año 2005, más de 30 fardos funerarios fueron excavados en una tumba de cámara delante del Templo de Pachacamac (también conocido como Templo Pintado), donde se encontró el fardo más grande y elaborado en la parte más interior de la tumba, rodeado y apiñado por otros fardos. Planteamos como hipótesis que dicho fardo contuvo al líder y ancestro del grupo social que colectivamente estuvo a cargo de su cuidado (por ejemplo, re-enfardelándolo) y que prosiguió usando la tumba para enterrar a los miembros fallecidos de las generaciones posteriores. Sometimos a prueba esta hipótesis mediante la datación por carbono 14 de muestras de tejido blando y de diferentes capas de telas y otros materiales utilizados en los envoltorios de los fardos, así como a través de un análisis estadístico Bayesiano de las fechas resultantes. Asimismo, a fin de corregir el efecto reservorio marino, determinamos las proporciones de isótopos de carbono y nitrógeno para estimar la importancia relativa de los recursos marinos en la dieta de los individuos enterrados. Nuestro estudio sugiere que no se practicó ninguna renovación de los fardos enterrados, que la tumba fue utilizada por más de 500 años desde 1000 cal d.C. y que los fardos fueron reacomodados espacialmente cada vez que se introdujeron nuevos fardos en la tumba. En conjunto, estas diversas líneas de evidencia indican que la tumba tuvo una historia de uso bastante larga y compleja, y que albergó fardos de individuos provenientes de diversos lugares y orígenes sociales, lo que pone en duda las ideas convencionales sobre el significado social y cronológico de fardos coexistentes en grandes tumbas.