| dc.description.abstract | Along the eastern slopes of the Andes, the montaña separates Amazonian and Andean South America. It is a dynamic zone, where multiple cultural groups come together, overlap, and interact in ways that are poorly documented through direct archaeological investigation. This dissertation examines the local manifestation of this boundary zone through archaeological survey and excavation of a late prehispanic (1000-1532 CE) village called Wimba, situated at 1500 masl in northeastern Peru. Wimba is located at the eastern edge of the Chachapoyas cultural region, where the Inka demarcated a frontier between highland and lowland societies (ca. 1500 CE). Given the site’s distinct geographic position, this project explores the following research questions: How did people create social identities and boundaries at Wimba? How might boundaries have changed as the region became part of the Inka empire? Together, these inquiries address how social boundaries are created through the dual processes of boundary maintenance and interaction. This intensive approach to one site complicates the larger narrative of cultural difference based on traits like environment, subsistence, or language.
Results from excavation show that people participated in communal feasts in delineated public space, with visual connections to important landscape features. During feasts, collective identities were formed and reinforced through distinct food and feasting paraphernalia, and the gathering of people was an opportunity for networks of exchange to develop. Portable adornments worn at the site suggest people participated in a lower montaña interaction network that stretched east to the lowlands and west to the Pacific coast. Feasting cuisine connected Wimba with highland neighbors, broadly speaking. Decorated serving wares, however, provide evidence for more specific late prehispanic regional socioeconomic affiliations. This dissertation finds that the highland/lowland boundary was more porous before incorporation into the Inka empire and changed into a more hardened boundary alongside Inka imposition of a Chachapoya cultural identity. Finally, this project demonstrates the possibility for intensive archaeological investigation to discover detailed interregional connections, and these results contribute to the anthropological study of boundary regions as zones of active community creation and mediation of regional and interregional differences. | |
