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信恐龙;信息和决策的传播速度只能与人类一样快，安第斯人民不知道写作。 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发展替代性的治国模式，以及其他整合其臣民的原则。根据西班牙人对印加帝国的目击记录，考古学家们一直怀疑，前西班牙国家治理的一个关键整合机制是政治上重要人物精心制作的丧葬仪式。 在印加帝国，精心保存的已故统治者的尸体是王朝继承和政治连续性的物质象征。 通过定期的仪式和精美的陵墓，木乃伊是政治合法化和帝国权威的公共传播信息的场所。 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中，如瓦里人，对这个话题的了解要少得多;在某种程度上，他是印加人的先驱，在公元400年至800年间统治着高地。 Charlene Milliken女士的博士论文项目在Marc Bermann博士的指导下进行，将调查秘鲁的Conchopata遗址。 在鼎盛时期，孔乔帕塔是瓦里帝国（公元600-1000年）的第二个中心，由住宅区、公共广场、陶器作坊、寺庙和专门的殡仪馆组成。挖掘将集中在与两个太平间建筑群相关的住宅环境上，研究将测试这些太平间建筑群被Conchopata精英用于崇拜重要祖先的假设。Conchopata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整的太平间结构;通常这些设施很久以前就被抢劫或摧毁了。本项目将首次调查丧葬活动在瓦里政治治国中的潜在作用，作为一种在不识字的非西方人口中构建和表达权威的本土手段。

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.