Doctoral Dissertation Research: Food Production, Ritual, and Community Organization at Ancient Hualcayan (Ancash, Peru)

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Rebecca Bria of Vanderbilt University will collaborate with Peruvian colleagues to study how people constitute new communities following the decline of interregional religious and political networks. Previous scholarship has shown how, during periods of political decline and regeneration, people use ritual performance to establish new community affiliations. Economic studies have also shown how new food production regimes transform community interaction. Building on and expanding these studies, this research focuses attention on the poorly understood links between these ritual and economic practices in order to broaden our understanding of the complex conditions, materials, and processes through which communities are established and organized. In particular, it studies how ritual and food production changed during a pivotal process of social transformation in Andean prehistory, characterized by the demise of the widespread Chavín religion and political network during the Early Horizon (900-1 B.C.E.) and the rise of localized Recuay agro-pastoral communities in the Early Intermediate Period (1-600 C.E.). Archaeology, a discipline that examines the long-term changes in materials and practices of past human societies, is particularly well suited to study this process of community regeneration. Broadly, the study contributes new perspectives on food production and community formation by focusing less on economic adaptation and more on the religious values and political motivations through which people shaped their environment and built a community. The project will also contribute insights to an important topic in anthropological research and contemporary politics: how people undergoing extensive political and religious change establish new social identities and define new kinds of community. The research has the potential to uncrease understanding of political changes which are occurring in many regions of the world today.Rebecca Bria and her collaborators will investigate how ancient communities gained political and economic autonomy and reorganized local social affiliations during periods of regional political decline, particularly by establishing new food production regimes and new types of ritual performances. The study will analyze food remains excavated from ritual contexts at Hualcayán, an archaeological site that was continuously occupied during the period of Chavín decline and Recuay emergence in Ancash, Peru. The project hypothesizes that a transfor¬mation in community organization was predicated upon changes in ritual and food production, which had previously supported elites engaged in ritual activities at Hualcayán's Chavín temple and then provided the foundation for a new Recuay community rooted in corporate group rituals and agricultural management. To test the hypothesis, the project will analyze and compare macrobotanical, phytolith and starch, and faunal remains from the Chavín temple and from Recuay ritual compounds and tombs that are spatially embedded into a system of agricultural terraces, as well as date these contexts by 14C means. This analysis will document the degree to which people at Hualcayán transformed their Chavín temple site into a Recuay community by intensifying, diversifying, and ritualizing food production and will examine whether and how newly formed Recuay corporate groups were distinguished by ritual food preparation and consumption practices. The research will strengthen intellectual and cultural ties between Peru and the United States through an international scientific collaboration, and the results will be presented to the public in peer-reviewed publications and museum installations.