Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Ritual and Status: Mortuary Display at the Household Level at the Middle Horizon Site of Conchopata

古代安第斯帝国是通讯恐龙；信息和决策只能以人类的最快速度传播，安第斯人民不懂书写。由于缺乏同时代欧洲或亚洲国家的行政技术，安第斯山脉的本土帝国被迫开发替代的治国模式和其他原则，以整合其臣民。根据西班牙目击者对印加帝国的描述，考古学家长期以来一直怀疑，理解西班牙人治国的关键综合机制之一，是政治上重要人物的精心设计的殡葬做法。在印加帝国，精心保存的尺子遗体是王朝继承和政治延续的物质象征。通过定期的仪式和精致的陵墓，木乃伊成为公开传播政治合法化和皇权信息的场所。虽然死者在印加治国中的作用已经得到了很好的研究，但在早期安第斯帝国，如瓦里帝国，对这一话题的了解要少得多；在某些方面，死者是公元400至800年间统治高地的印加人的先驱。夏琳·米利肯女士的博士论文项目在马克·贝曼博士的指导下进行，将调查秘鲁康乔波塔的遗址。在鼎盛时期，康乔波塔是瓦里帝国(公元600-1000)的次要中心，由住宅区、公共广场、陶器作坊、寺庙和专门的太平间建筑群组成。挖掘将集中在与两个殡仪馆相关的居住环境中，研究将检验这样的假设，即这些殡仪馆是由Conchoata精英用来祭拜重要的祖先的。康乔普塔是进行这项研究的一个特别好的地点，因为已经发现了几个完好的停尸房结构；通常情况下，这些设施很久以前就被洗劫或摧毁了。该项目将首次对殡葬活动在瓦里政治治国中的潜在作用进行调查，作为在不识字的非西方人口中建立和表达权威的一种本地手段。

Ancient Andean empires were communications dinosaurs; information and decision-making traveled only as fast as a human could, and the Andean peoples did not know writing. Lacking the administrative technology of contemporaneous European or Asian states, the native empires of the Andes were forced to develop alternative modes of statecraft, and other principles to integrate their subject populations. Archaeologists have long suspected, based on Spanish eyewitness accounts of the Inka empire, that one of the crucial integrative mechanisms of prehispanic statecraft was the elaborate mortuary practices of the politically important. In the Inka empire, the carefully kept bodies of deceased rulers served as material symbols of dynastic succession and political continuity. Through periodic rituals andfine mausoleums mummies were the setting for public communication of messages of political legitimization and imperial authority. While the role of the dead in Inka statecraft has been well studied, much less is known about this topic in early Andean empires, such as the Wari; in some ways a fore-runner of the Inka that dominated the highlands between AD 400 and 800. Ms. Charlene Milliken's doctoral dissertation project, conducted under the direction of Dr. Marc Bermann, will investigate the site of Conchopata, Peru. At its height, Conchopata was a secondary center of the Wari empire (A.D. 600-1000) and consisted of residential zones, public plazas, pottery workshops, temples, and specialized mortuary complexes. Excavation will center on residential contexts associated with two mortuary complexes, and research will test the hypothesis that these mortuary complexes were used by Conchopata elites in the veneration of important ancestors. Conchopata is a particularly good location for this research because several intact mortuary structures have been uncovered; normally these kinds of facilities were looted or destroyed long ago. This project will provide the first investigation of the potential role of mortuary activity in Wari political statecraft as one native means by which authority is constructed and expressed in non-literate, non-Western populations.