Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Urbanism and Social Organization at the Late Moche Period Site of Pampa Grande, Peru

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Under the direction of Dr. Charles Stanish, Ilana Johnson will collect data for her doctoral dissertation at the Moche site of Pampa Grande, located in the Lambayeque Valley, Peru. The site of Pampa Grande is four square kilometers of dense urban settlement and was home to tens of thousands of inhabitants at its height during the Late Moche Period (AD 600-800). Pampa Grande is most well known for its large civic-ceremonial center which includes the Huaca Fortaleza, a towering mud-brick pyramid used for rituals and administration by the site's ruling elites. Investigations for this project will be carried out in the domestic sector of the Southern Pediment of the site, believed to have housed the lower class majority. This research will assess the development of urbanism and the associated changes in social organization that occurred as people from the surrounding valley aggregated and amalgamated into a rapidly colonized center. Urban research has shown that the family is no longer autonomous in the context of the city. New forms of social organization based on socio-economic status, occupation, and ethnicity develop as unrelated people come together and form new social communities. An earlier survey by Ilana Johnson has revealed three markedly different residential areas in the Southern Pediment. Perhaps most interesting is the presence of apartment-like compounds suggesting new types of social organization beyond the household level. These three domestic areas will be sampled and compared through area excavations in order to test hypotheses regarding the social changes that occur with the development of urbanism. Excavations will be carried out within several rooms inside the apartment compounds in order to understand the layout of individual domiciles, as well as the compound as a whole. Three hypotheses will be explored in detail. First, research will explore if neighborhoods were organized by occupation or socio-economic status. Second, excavations within apartment compounds will examine if the household remained autonomous in the context of urbanism. And finally, domestic artifacts will be analyzed to determine if foreign objects represent ethnic differences or merchant ties. The resulting data will shed light onto the types of communities developed among the lower class inhabitants of Pampa Grande in prehistory. The proposed research will make contributions to the local community of Pampa Grande, to the understanding of Moche prehistory, as well as to broader anthropological theory. Public outreach will be conducted in the form of lectures, classroom visits, and donations of time and money to the local site museum. The intellectual merit of this project will be to provide data on rapid urbanism in state societies. The data recovered during investigations will shed light onto the social affiliations and stratifications that developed in response to the new physical, social, and cultural surroundings of a densely urbanized city. The broader impact is an anthropological understanding of such behavior from around the world. These data will be valuable for cross-cultural comparisons with primary urban centers in other geographic areas. As the population of the globe approaches ten billion in the next two generations, such research will be invaluable for defining strategies and adaptations employed by people in a number of different cultural contexts.