Charles Stanish

Interpreting conflict in the ancient andes: implications for the archaeology of warfare

This article critically assesses recent interpretations of premodern defensive architecture and militaristic themes in the archaeological record, using the Andes as a case study. While archaeologists have proposed intriguing alternative hypotheses that call into question the existence of war in the past, much evidence for conflict has been incautiously dismissed. This stance has seriously skewed our understanding of the development of premodern societies. It is suggested here that because archaeologists underutilize ethnographic and historical evidence, the architecture of premodern defenses is poorly understood and many arguments used to dismiss military interpretations are incorrect. These misperceptions are addressed with empirical observations based upon known analogies from ethnography and history. The problematic dichotomy of ritual battle and real war is discussed, and the article concludes with a reassessment of the evidence for warfare in a few controversial Andean contexts in terms of more relia...This article critically assesses recent interpretations of premodern defensive architecture and militaristic themes in the archaeological record, using the Andes as a case study. While archaeologists have proposed intriguing alternative hypotheses that call into question the existence of war in the past, much evidence for conflict has been incautiously dismissed. This stance has seriously skewed our understanding of the development of premodern societies. It is suggested here that because archaeologists underutilize ethnographic and historical evidence, the architecture of premodern defenses is poorly understood and many arguments used to dismiss military interpretations are incorrect. These misperceptions are addressed with empirical observations based upon known analogies from ethnography and history. The problematic dichotomy of ritual battle and real war is discussed, and the article concludes with a reassessment of the evidence for warfare in a few controversial Andean contexts in terms of more reliable material criteria for recognizing the existence of war and peace in the archaeological record.

The Hydraulic Hypothesis Revisited: Lake Titicaca Basin Raised Fields in Theoretical Perspective

Archaeological research over several decades has documented extensive areas of relict raised fields throughout the Americas. The existence of huge tracts of fields utilized in a context of complex political evolution has fostered a debate similar to the “hydraulic hypothesis” controversy, originated by Julian Steward and Karl Wittfogel over a generation ago. In this paper I assess recent research and offer a model that is tested with settlement and demographic data from the Juli-Pomata area of Lake Titicaca in southern Peru. The key variables of the model are differential levels of surplus production, the control of domestic labor by elite groups, and opportunistic economic strategies by the elite. The Juli-Pomata data support a causal link between complex political organization and the existence of labor-intensive raised-field systems. The simplistic explanations of the hydraulic hypothesis remain untenable, but I argue that more subtle causal relationships exist between political centralization and agricultural intensification.

Initial Social Complexity in Southwestern Asia: The Mesopotamian Advantage

The emergence of early Mesopotamian (Sumerian) civilization must be understood within the framework of the unique ecology and geography of the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers during the late 5th and 4th millennia B.C. The former gave Mesopotamian societies important advantages in agricultural productivity and subsistence resource resilience not possessed by contemporary polities on their periphery, while the latter gave them enduring transportational advantages. This material imbalance created opportunities and incentives that made it both possible and probable that early Mesopotamian elites would use trade as one of their earliest and most important tools to legitimize and expand their unequal access to resources and power. Given this, a still hypothetical but testable) model is presented that accounts for the precocious socioeconomic differentiation and urban growth of southern Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium as social multiplier effects inadvertently set in motion by evolving trade patterns. This trade was first largely internal, between individual southern polities exploiting rich but localized ecological niches within the Mesopotamian alluvium during the Late Ubaid and Early Uruk periods. By the Middle and Late Uruk periods, however, inherently asymmetrical external trade between growing southern cities and societies at their periphery in control of coveted resources gained more prominence. In due course, import-substitution processes further amplified the one-sided socio-evolutionary impact on southern societies of these shifting trade patterns. Unequal developmental rates resulting from the operation of these processes over time explain why the earliest complex societies of southwestern Asia appeared in southern Mesopotamia and not elsewhere.

Tiwanaku Political Economy

The site of Tiwanaku was one of the earliest monuments in the Andes to capture the attention of the early chroniclers. These historians were keenly aware of how important the ruins at Tiwanaku were in the life of the people of the central Andes. It is therefore understandable that many of their accounts of Andean origin narratives at Tiwanaku were often recast with Christian symbolism.

Regional Research on the Inca

The past two decades have witnessed an increase in the amount of regional research on the Inca state of Andean South America. This work has revolutionized our view of the Inca empire and has provided a comparative database for understanding the nature of imperial expansion in premodern empires. This paper places this work in historical context. It then describes the way in which a regional approach has complemented other research to give us a fuller picture of Inca imperial strategies. The Inca state used a variety of strategies to incorporate its provinces into a viable political entity. Regional archaeological approaches provide the best means of defining those strategies, giving us a more nuanced view of premodern states such as the Inca.

War and early state formation in the northern Titicaca Basin, Peru

Excavations at the site of Taraco in the northern Titicaca Basin of southern Peru indicate a 2,600-y sequence of human occupation beginning ca. 1100 B.C.E. Previous research has identified several political centers in the region in the latter part of the first millennium B.C.E. The two largest centers were Taraco, located near the northern lake edge, and Pukara, located 50 km to the northwest in the grassland pampas. Our data reveal that a high-status residential section of Taraco was burned in the first century A.D., after which economic activity in the area dramatically declined. Coincident with this massive fire at Taraco, Pukara adopted many of the characteristics of state societies and emerged as an expanding regional polity. We conclude that organized conflict, beginning approximately 500 B.C.E., is a significant factor in the evolution of the archaic state in the northern Titicaca Basin.

Direct evidence of 1,900 years of indigenous silver production in the Lake Titicaca Basin of Southern Peru

Archaeological excavations at a U-shaped pyramid in the northern Lake Titicaca Basin of Peru have documented a continuous 5-m-deep stratigraphic sequence of metalworking remains. The sequence begins in the first millennium AD and ends in the Spanish Colonial period ca. AD 1600. The earliest dates associated with silver production are 1960 ± 40 BP (2-sigma cal. 40 BC to AD 120) and 1870 ± 40 BP (2-sigma cal. AD 60 to 240) representing the oldest known silver smelting in South America. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) analysis of production debris indicate a complex, multistage, high temperature technology for producing silver throughout the archaeological sequence. These data hold significant theoretical implications including the following: (i) silver production occurred before the development of the first southern Andean state of Tiwanaku, (ii) the location and process of silverworking remained consistent for 1,500 years even though political control of the area cycled between expansionist states and smaller chiefly polities, and (iii) that U-shaped structures were the location of ceremonial, residential, and industrial activities.

The Emergence of Complex Society in the Titicaca Basin: The View from the North

The Titicaca Basin straddles the modern countries of Peru and Bolivia and represents one of the great areas of prehistoric cultural evolution on the globe. While it is common to view the Andes as a culturally-unified whole, the reality is that there were three very distinct cultural, geographical, and linguistic regions in the Andes in the 16th century where these state societies developed (Figures 9.1, 9.2). These regions corresponded to the general areas of Wari, Moche, and Tiwanaku state expansion in the late Early Intermediate Period and Middle Horizon where proto-Quechua, Mochic, and Jaqi languages dominated respectively (Browman 1994; Mannheim 1991; Stanish 2001). In short, the Titicaca Basin, where Jaqi or proto-Aymara was dominant and was most likely the language of the Tiwanaku state (see Janusek 2004 for a fuller discussion), represents one of the great areas of first-generation state development in world. In areas where first-generation states developed without much influence from neighboring areas, such as the Titicaca Basin, we can study the processes by which complex society develops. The term “complex society” is of course controversial. We reject totalizing notions of cultural evolution and instead see the evolution of complex society as confined to political and economic organization. Cultural complexity is defined as a process of increasing heterogeneity in economic and political organization with craft specialization, proliferation of political and social statuses, creation of economies of scale and so forth as the key indices of complexity. Evolution is likewise not stepwise nor unidirectional. Political and economic organizations become increasingly more heterogeneous as well as becoming more homogenous with some frequency (see Marcus 1992 for a discussion of cycling complex societies). It is critical to note that other aspects of human culture do not evolve in this way. The evolution of complex society can therefore be measured by the increase or decrease in the differentiation and heterogeneity of political and economic lifeways (Plourde 2005; Stanish 2004). In this paper we examine this critical question in anthropological archaeology— the emergence of the first politically and economically complex societies—with information from the Titicaca Basin. We will show that while our knowledge of this

Agricultural Intensification in the Titicaca Basin

For the past 100 years, anthropological theories of the evolution of complex society have been intimately linked to agricultural production. From the 19th century evolutionists and Marxists through V. G Childe, Julian Steward, and contemporary archaeological theory, agricultural production has figured consistently in our idea of what created the conditions for the emergence of sedentary populations, urban environments, and hierarchical political structures.

Interpreting Conflict in the Ancient Andes

This article critically assesses recent interpretations of premodern defensive architecture and militaristic themes in the archaeological record, using the Andes as a case study. While archaeologists have proposed intriguing alternative hypotheses that call into question the existence of war in the past, much evidence for conflict has been incautiously dismissed. This stance has seriously skewed our understanding of the development of premodern societies. It is suggested here that because archaeologists underutilize ethnographic and historical evidence, the architecture of premodern defenses is poorly understood and many arguments used to dismiss military interpretations are incorrect. These misperceptions are addressed with empirical observations based upon known analogies from ethnography and history. The problematic dichotomy of ritual battle and real war is discussed, and the article concludes with a reassessment of the evidence for warfare in a few controversial Andean contexts in terms of more relia...This article critically assesses recent interpretations of premodern defensive architecture and militaristic themes in the archaeological record, using the Andes as a case study. While archaeologists have proposed intriguing alternative hypotheses that call into question the existence of war in the past, much evidence for conflict has been incautiously dismissed. This stance has seriously skewed our understanding of the development of premodern societies. It is suggested here that because archaeologists underutilize ethnographic and historical evidence, the architecture of premodern defenses is poorly understood and many arguments used to dismiss military interpretations are incorrect. These misperceptions are addressed with empirical observations based upon known analogies from ethnography and history. The problematic dichotomy of ritual battle and real war is discussed, and the article concludes with a reassessment of the evidence for warfare in a few controversial Andean contexts in terms of more reliable material criteria for recognizing the existence of war and peace in the archaeological record.