Deborah E. Blom

Making place: humans as dedications in Tiwanaku

The character of dedication assemblages is frequently linked to the specific place and social context in which they are deposited. At the site of Tiwanaku, political and ceremonial center of a prehispanic state that influenced much of the South American Andes for several centuries (ad 500–1150), human dedications shaped the significance of built ritual environments. We compare the treatment and deposition of human remains in two ritual contexts at Tiwanaku: Akapana and Akapana East. In Akapana, some human remains took on the significance of human sacrifices and, in Akapana East, they appear to have been carefully curated ancestors. In the one, they represented élite bids for power and the encompassing identity of the emerging Tiwanaku community and, in the other, they embodied the common identity of a local residential group. Through human dedications, architectural constructions came to embody the identity of scaled social communities, ultimately uniting the diverse groups, élite and commoner, who inhabited and worshipped in the center of the emerging civilization.

Urban Structure at Tiwanaku: Geophysical Investigations in the Andean Altiplano

Fieldwork at Tiwanaku sites in recent decades has opened new avenues of inquiry into the characteristics of the Tiwanaku polity, but archaeology has been hampered by the inability to make large-scale characterizations of the organization of urban and monumental space because of the depositional processes that interred its cities and monuments. In this paper, we use several geophysical techniques, including magnetometry, electrical resistivity, and ground-penetrating radar to begin to visualize some of these spaces. In doing so, we outline a methodology for recreating the urban spatial structure of the six-square-kilometer Tiwanaku capital. Our preliminary work compares excavations at the Putuni, Mollo Kontu, and Akapana East sectors with geophysical data that has expanded our understanding of both residential and monumental spaces to provide a first glimpse at the potential of imaging Tiwanaku’s buried urban structure.

Reflections on Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Childhood in the Past

ABSTRACT One of the hallmarks of research on childhood in the past is inclusive, interdisciplinary thinking. This reliance on interdisciplinarity to produce robust scholarship speaks, in part, to the ways we think about children and childhood today, as simultaneously embodied, material, cognitive, intersectional, relational, and developmental. Scholars working and connecting across disciplinary boundaries are also a product of the relatively recent emergence of childhood as an area of scholarly interest and the marginalization of the topic in traditional disciplinary silos. This paper takes a unique approach to addressing the interdisciplinary nature of scholarship on children and childhood in the past. Four scholars have produced reflective essays: a theatre historian, an art historian, an archaeologist/teaching professional, and a bioarchaeologist, which offer perspectives and insights into the importance of interdisciplinary thinking in their own work, and by extension in their larger fields of disciplinary practice.