Under the direction of Dr. Richard Burger Mr. Yuichi Matsumoto will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will analyze archaeological materials from the site of Campanayuq Rumi in Vilcashuaman, Department of Ayacucho, Peru. Mr. Matsumoto conducted archaeological excavations at the site for two field seasons from 2007 to 2008. These excavations revealed that Campanayuq Rumi was one of the most important ceremonial centers in the central highlands of Peru during the Formative Period (1800-200 B.C.). Preliminary analysis of the materials obtained from his research suggests that Campanayuq Rumi functioned as a large ceremonial center under the strong religious influence of ChavÃn de Huántar, the most important ceremonial and pilgrimage center of the period, located 600km to the North. It also served as an important node of interregional interaction.
It has been hypothesized that the central Andes witnessed the emergence of complex societies under the impetus of an expansion of religious ideology from ChavÃn de Huántar during the late Initial and Early Horizon Periods. While large ceremonial centers and social stratification emerged during this period along the coast and northern highlands, the south central highlands had been regarded as a "backwater" because of the lack of large civic-ceremonial centers. However Mr. Matsumoto's research at Campanayuq Rumi suggests the need to radically alter this position. The new evidence indicates that Campanayuq Rumi probably emerged as the focus of the first complex society of the region through the interaction with the more complex society of ChavÃn de Huántar and that it collapsed in accordance with the latter's decline.
Emergence and transformation of complex societies remains as an important theoretical topic of anthropology and archaeology. Campanayuq Rumi provides an excellent setting to evaluate this process at a regional level and thus this project will help to consider the following broad theoretical issues: 1) How and why did a relatively egalitarian society based on corporate social groups develop complex hierarchical social arrangements by directly interacting with a distant more complex society? 2) How did the new complex system transform through time? 3) How did the interaction between these societies change diachronically? Accelerator Mass Spectrometry radiocarbon dating of the organic samples will provide a fine-grained chronological framework to consider these issues diachronically. X-ray fluorescence analysis of obsidian artifacts will help to enhance understanding of long distance exchange patterns during the Formative, which is necessary to understand interregional interaction.
Beyond research questions of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists, this project will also contribute to local community identity by sharing the information of Campanayuq Rumi with them. The site has become crucial to the identity of local people in Vilcashuaman. Several educational institutions now visit the site to teach how the history of Vilcashuaman was deeper than the textbooks report. Because of the public attention paid to Campanayuq Rumi as a result of this research, the regional government of Ayacucho is trying to utilize Campanayuq Rumi as a tourist attraction to provide an economic benefit to the region. The new data from this project will help the plan by providing a strong academic foundation for these activities. Furthermore, Mr. Matsumoto will gain training as a graduate student in the method of analysis mentioned above.
