Interregional Trade and the Development of Archaic States

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With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Charles Stanish, Michael Moseley, Ryan Williams, and an international team of scholars will conduct an archaeological survey between the coast and highlands of southern Peru. The team is constituted of U.S. and Peruvian researchers with expertise in archaeology, ethnohistory, and GIS who will assess the nature of trade and exchange in the earliest Andean states. The survey will examine the little known region between the best-documented colony of the ancient Tiwanaku state in Moquegua, Peru and its capital in the Titicaca Basin of Bolivia. This 250 kilometer zone crosses some of the most rugged terrain in the Americas, climbing over 5000 meters in elevation. The research will focus on how ancient states maintained trade routes with far flung outposts in the period between 500 and 1000 AD when these polities first emerged. It will also be poised to compare investments in state infrastructure like roads and way stations from the early state period with the better-known Inca empire as well as preceding cultural groups like Pukara and the archaic hunter-gatherers.The team will conduct full-scale archaeological survey around two areas with extensive pasture resources and at historical crossroads. They will also survey extensive portions of paths detected from aerial imagery to identify settlements and features that date their use. Their goal is to determine whether formal roads and way stations were part of the earliest state infrastructure, or if only informal paths connecting dispersed settlements was the norm during the Tiwanaku Period. The results of the survey will tell us how the earliest archaic states managed to expand beyond their heartlands and how they maintained connections with distant colonies over the course of hundreds of years.The research program will yield new insights into the ties that bind colonial enterprises to their heartlands. It innovates a new methodology that uses computer models and geographic network analysis to survey large archaeological regions. The intellectual merit of the program will thus enable researchers to examine how archaic states integrate their territories and maintain the flow of goods and services over long distances.The broader impacts of the study include fostering international collaboration between U.S. and Peruvian scholars, training students from both countries, and building scientific understanding through museums and public outreach in both nations. It will focus on a poorly understood area in the highlands of Peru that may yield many new research programs and questions to be answered. It will also help us to better understand the relationship between large-scale human societies and their impacts on environment.