(Re)constructing the sacred: landscape geoarchaeology at Chavin de Huantar, Peru

摘要

Chavin de Huantar is a first millennium B.C.E. Central Andean ceremonial center set in a steep mountainous landscape that is at once dynamic and, traditional Andean belief systems would suggest, sacred and animate. Landscape geoarchaeology at the site serves to examine both of these factors, characterizing the site's dynamic environment while also examining the ways in which Chavin's inhabitants interacted with their fraught surroundings. Using mapping of geomorphic hazards, the character and chronology of the site's construction and expansion, and ethnohistoric information on the relationships of indigenous Andean peoples to their environments, I discuss ways of examining this interaction. Landscape geoarchaeology at Chavin reveals the site's expressed relationship with the sacred, which was a key aspect of the emergence and reification of sociopolitical inequality at the site.