Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The Significance of Sunken Court Architecture to the Development of Sociopolitical Complexity

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Under the direction of Dr. Charles Stanish, Amanda Cohen will collect data for her doctoral dissertation during the Summer and Fall of 2002. She will direct excavations at a sample of three Formative Period (1200 B.C. - A.D. 300) sites in the Pukara Valley of the northwestern Lake Titicaca Basin, Peru. This research will assess the role of public or ceremonial architecture in the evolution of complex societies in the Titicaca Basin of southern Peru. A process of steady settlement nucleation and growth took place during the region's Formative Period, culminating in the emergence of the Pukara Polity (200 BC - AD 300), the earliest known urban-scale society in the southern Andean region. Prior to the rise of Pukara in the Late Formative Period, the Pukara Valley was populated by a series of small villages. It was within this context of interacting autonomous villages that public architecture emerged in the Early and Middle Formative Periods (1200 B.C.-200 B.C.). These social evolutionary processes were paralleled by the development and elaboration of a distinctive tradition of public architecture, sunken courts with associated surface structures, and an associated corporate ceramic and sculptural style. An earlier survey by the applicant has located at least a dozen sites in the Pukara Valley containing low mounds with central rectangular depressions, almost certainly indicating the presence of sunken courts. To test the relation between the sunken court architectural form and increasing sociopolitical complexity, three of these sites representing the Early and Middle phases of the Formative Period will be sampled. The resulting data will trace architectural and behavioral changes through time at sites with sunken courts. Two models that purport to explain the social significance of early ceremonial architecture will be evaluated. The first suggests that as societies become increasingly stratified ceremonial structures become increasingly specialized. In this scenario, early examples of public architecture are normally associated with a wide range of activities, ritual and domestic. As sociopolitical complexity increases, however, the range of activities associated with public architecture becomes restricted to ritual or ceremonial activities. An alternate model is that public architectural features are highly specialized early in their history, and become less specialized over time as community permanence and cohesion become increasingly institutionalized in the practices of everyday life. In this view, the social integrative function of public ritual facilities is most important in the early stages of sedentary life. The proposed research will evaluate these two models through a diachronic analysis of Pukara Valley sunken courts, their architectural form, and associated artifact assemblages. The study has implications for comparative social science study. Additionally, the survey, combined with paleoecological and paleoclimate data, may be of some use to development programs in the future. This project will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and shed new light on the development of complex societies