Under the supervision of Dr. Joyce Marcus, Allison R. Davis will analyze data gathered during her excavations at Yuthu, a village site in Cusco, Peru, occupied from ca. 600 BC to AD 200. Although Cusco is well-known as the capital of the much later Inka Empire, almost nothing is known about the daily lives and political organization of early villagers in the area. Davis's excavations are (1) the first designed to identify houses and community buildings for the early village period and (2) the first to collect data on the activities carried out within them.
One goal of this project is to determine whether the ancient villagers of Yuthu were self-sufficient to meet their subsistence and non-subsistence needs at the level of the household, the village, or multi-village network. Villagers may have considered themselves to be part of a network of settlements that was not necessarily the same group who provisioned their everyday activities. Indeed, based on studies of early villagers elsewhere, one comes to expect that the perceptions of membership and the actual practices that define the limits of a human community are fluid and may even vary independently of one another at times.
In the Andes today various economic networks integrate settlements spanning many ecological zones. In addition, a set of beliefs ties individuals and families to a sacred landscape that extends well beyond the limits of their village. These enduring concepts structure the lives of people today and this project will allow one to determine whether similar beliefs shaped the lives of people in the past. This project will compare the use of non-local items in domestic contexts to items used in ceremonial contexts at Yuthu, one village in a multi-village network, in order to understand how archaeologists can define community at two levels: (1) the actual reliance on distant places to provision daily activities and (2) the role of distant places in the conception of community membership that is reinforced in periodic rituals of integration. Results will show whether or not the perceived and practical limits of a community, evident in the material remains of ceremonial and domestic practices, co-varied as villages lost autonomy and became part of a regional polity for the first time.
In addition to helping archaeologists and other social scientists understand community organization in high-altitude environments throughout the world, this project will train Peruvian and U.S. students in archaeology. The project results will be made available to the scientific community through scholarly journal articles in English and Spanish, conference presentations, and the Ph.D. thesis of Allison R. Davis. Results will be presented to the local community of Collana-Cruzpata-Chequerec in site reports and oral presentations made in their town meetings.
