![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
During violent times, the defence of the community can be a powerful motivation for cooperation. This goal can outweigh other needs, and depending on the frequency and scale of the threat, people may even modify their daily habitus. Changes in settlement patterns and infrastructure are manifestations of these behavioural shifts as well as evidence of the modification of the networks of cooperation and the formation of new collectivities. Using the case of the transition between the Late and Final Formative in the Nepeña Middle Valley, North Coast of Peru, I explore and analyse the relationship between escalated conflict and the formation of new social identities and political coalitions. During this time, multiple interests, including different sources of threat, were shaping various nested systems of cooperation in the same region.
Acknowledgements
The main fieldwork was funded by the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant No 1238352 and Geoeye Imagery Foundation. Preliminary research was carried out by the support of the Department of Anthropology and the Center of Latin American Studies of the University of Pittsburgh. The Ministerio de Cultura del Perú granted authorization for conducting the research and supervised the fieldwork. The analyses were carried out in the Laboratorios de Arqueología of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima. I thank Dr David Chicoine for reading and commenting on the first draft of this article, and to Rachel Chamberlin for proofreading the text. Finally, the comments and suggestion of Dr Elizabeth De Marrais and two anonymous reviewers were insightful and very helpful in improving the coherence of the text.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The chronology used in this article follows the general Andean sequence proposed by Kaulicke (Citation2010), and the local Nepeña Valley sequence proposed by Shibata (Citation2010).
2 The methodology of the estimation of plaza audience is fully explained in Ikehara (Citation2015). Considering that ritual encounters occur at different scales of the society, it is very likely that some of the ritual spaces must have been used only for the local group. Under this first assumption, a local household group spatially associated with a small enclosure was identified. Then using the area of the plaza, and the population estimates of the associated dwellings, a ratio of n people per m2 was obtained. Then, under the second assumption that this ratio could be used for larger spaces, the audiences for plazas were obtained.
3 Higher-ranked people were identified using the proxy of the relative proportion of fine pottery in the survey units’ collections. Collections of higher-ranked families were considered those with fine pottery proportions higher than one standard deviation from the average of the whole survey zone for that period. Not all the Final Formative collections from the survey units were used in the comparison. I considered proportions lower than 0.9 as households remains, and proportions higher than 0.9 as ritual caches. Only those collections with more than five sherds were used to avoid unrealistic high proportions caused by small samples. These two decisions were arbitrary but it is better than using all the collections for the comparison.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Hugo C. Ikehara
Hugo C. Ikehara is an anthropological archaeologist who graduated from the Department of Anthropology of the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA. Currently he is Adjunct Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru, in Lima, Peru. His research focuses on the social dynamics of complex societies in the Central Andes, with a special interest in the transformation of the networks of cooperation and leadership in Formative societies of the North Coast of Peru.
