Conchopata: urbanism, craft production and interregional interaction in the Middle Horizon

This chapter reexamines ceramic production, and other possibly specialized activities, at Conchopata, a recently excavated Middle Horizon urban center in the Ayacucho Valley. Drawing on the exhaustive GIS database compiled by the Conchopata Project, we employ normalized choropleth maps and localized...

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Autor Principal: Tschauner, Hartmut
Otros Autores: Isbell, William H.
Formato: Artículo
Idioma: spa
Publicado: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú 2014
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Acceso en línea: http://revistas.pucp.edu.pe/index.php/boletindearqueologia/article/view/9167/pdf
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Sumario: This chapter reexamines ceramic production, and other possibly specialized activities, at Conchopata, a recently excavated Middle Horizon urban center in the Ayacucho Valley. Drawing on the exhaustive GIS database compiled by the Conchopata Project, we employ normalized choropleth maps and localized spatial autocorrelation statistics to examine the distributions of four categories of ceramic production implements — ceramic molds, polishers, scrapers, and pulidores — and contrast them with the distributions of artifacts related to lithic manufacturing. We find high concentrations of artifacts suggestive of both types of production to coincide with each other and to correlate with high concentrations of other kinds of materials, such as botanical remains and animal bones. Consequently, areas of the site with high densities of ceramic manufacturing tools are unlikely tohave been ceramic workshops, but more plausibly trash concentrations containing all manner of remains in high densities. Indiscriminate dumping of refuse stemming from various craft production activities as well as domestic waste is indicative of non-specialized discard behavior and, by inference, of non-specialized, domestic production. The fancy ceramics whose spread across much of the Central Andes constitutes the defining feature of the Middle Horizon do not appear to have been manufactured in a V. Gordon Childe-style urban setting associated with spatially differentiated and class-structured economic interdependency. It is unlikely that they imply the spread of this kind of urbanism during the Middle Horizon, and new, Andean models of Wari political organization, craft production, and interregional interaction must be explored by archaeologists.