With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Margaret Brown Vega and colleagues from the U.S. and Perú (Proyecto Awqa Pacha) will conduct archaeological research in the Huaura Valley on the Central Coast of Perú. Archaeologists have long sought to identify the causes and long-term consequences of war. Through a program of systematic survey and radiocarbon dating of fortifications, Proyecto Awqa Pacha seeks to contribute to these efforts. The project will establish the timing of fortification in the Huaura Valley during the first millennium BC, a span of time during which monumental defensive architecture was first built in the Central Andes. This span of time (the Early Horizon, ca. 900-200 BC, and subsequent transitional period, ca. 200 BC-AD 200) encompassed unprecedented regional interaction, followed by a breakdown of regional relationships, and subsequent reconfigurations that culminated in new regional polities. This is an ideal region for examining the role that war plays in such social changes.
Focused studies of fortifications establish the timing and spatial patterning of conflict, and permit examination of aggressive and cooperative interactions between groups living in a climate of war readiness. Prior research in the region suggests multiple pulses of fort construction. Relative chronologies prove too coarse to assess the contemporaneity, and changing distribution, of fortifications over time. Fieldwork will focus on acquiring samples for building a more refined chronological sequence of early fortifications using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry. These data will permit spatial analysis of contemporary fortifications to better understand group conflict throughout this millennium. Specifically, these data will be used to test for intravalley or intervalley conflict.
The research has multiple intellectual merits. A refined model for the development of fortifications in the Huaura Valley will enable other scholars to reconsider the broader regional phenomena of this early period of warfare on the Peruvian coast. Because many early fortifications are reused by later people, understanding this early period of warfare is critical to analyzing subsequent periods of culture change. The corpus of dates produced by this research will be a significant contribution to the radiocarbon database for the Central Andes. Beyond the Central Andes, the Huaura Valley case study will contribute new data and a more refined approach to assessing different scales of group conflict. Broadly, this assessment is fundamental for building, from archaeological data, adequate explanations of the causes and consequences of warfare. These data hold great potential for examining human-environment interactions, and assessing the relationship between climate records and cultural processes.
The broader impacts of the research are in training students and fostering international collaboration. Undergraduate students from the U.S.A. and Perú will be trained in data management, field acquisition of data, and analytical methods through hands on experience and individualized teaching. They will also participate directly as part of an international scholarly collaboration. Project results will be presented collaboratively and widely shared with scholars and the public via both print and digital mediums. The project's database will be accessible to other scholars in the future for both teaching and research activities.
