The Ancient Central Andes

The Ancient Central Andes presents a general overview of the prehistoric peoples and cultures of the Central Andes, the region now encompassing most of Peru and significant parts of Ecuador, Bolivia, northern Chile, and northwestern Argentina. The book contextualizes past and modern scholarship and provides a balanced view of current research. After an opening chapter that describes the intellectual, political, and practical background and history of research in the Central Andes, chapters proceed in chronological order from remote antiquity to the Spanish Conquest. A concluding chapter summarizes comment on Peruvian prehistory in "fact" and in practice, as a whole.

A number of important themes run through the book including: the tension in scholarship between those scholars who wish to study Peruvian antiquity on a comparative basis to understand the origins sedentism, domestication, and the origins of the state versus many Andeanists’ exceptionalist view of the region as incomparable with any other due to unique ways in which cultures developed there; the concept of "Lo Andino," commonly used by many specialists that assumes long-term, unchanging patterns of culture some of which are claimed to persist to the present verus the search for the origins of practices with assumption of their great temporal depth; recent arguments for culture change relying upon severe environmental events, particularly the meteorological phenomenon known as El Niño, that brings disastrous floods to the coast and drought to the highlands.

The Ancient Central Andes provides an up-to-date, objective survey of the archaeology of the central Andes that is much needed. Students and interested readers will benefit greatly from this introduction to a key period in South America’s past.