Recent Excavations at the Initial Period Site of Taukachi-Konkán, Casma Valley, Peru

Abstract

Taukachi-Konkán is a large planned settlement that formed part of the Sechín Alto Polity which governed the Casma Valley during the Initial Period. Fieldwork there during five seasons focused on four aligned platform mound complexes, three of which are oriented toward a road that enters Taukachi-Konkán from the north while the fourth complex forms a corner where the road enters the site center. Excavation and survey data revealed the mounds functioned in different ways relative to each other, the nearby road, and Taukachi-Konkan as a whole. Proposed mound functions range from the relatively secular role of the corner mound in overseeing road traffic to the clearly religious role of the second mound with friezes that suggest a cosmological model. A focus on architectural details allowed us to detect evidence of privileged groups, enabled us to better define the Sechin Alto Polity, and provided comparative material for use by other scholars.

Taukachi-Konkán es un gran asentamiento planificado que formó parte de la Política de Sechín Alto que gobernó el Valle de Casma durante el Período Inicial. El trabajo de campo allí durante cinco temporadas se centró en cuatro complejos de montículos de plataforma alineados, tres de los cuales están orientados hacia una carretera que ingresa a Taukachi-Konkán desde el norte, mientras que el cuarto complejo forma una esquina donde la carretera ingresa al centro del sitio. Los datos de excavación y prospección revelaron que los montículos funcionaban de diferentes maneras entre sí, la carretera cercana y Taukachi-Konkan en su conjunto. Las funciones del montículo propuestas van desde el papel relativamente secular del montículo de esquina en la supervisión del tráfico rodado hasta el papel claramente religioso del segundo montículo con frisos que sugieren un modelo cosmológico. Un enfoque en los detalles arquitectónicos nos permitió detectar evidencia de grupos privilegiados, nos permitió definir mejor la Política de Sechin Alto, y proporcionó material comparativo para el uso de otros académicos.

Keywords:

• Casma Valley
• Initial Period
• cosmology
• Peru
• archaeology

Acknowledgements

Permission to excavate at Taukachi-Konkán was granted by the Peruvian Ministerio de Cultura and funding was provided by an anonymous donor. We also would like to thank our colleagues Katie Woods and the late Bobbie Lovett for constant help with field recording and analysis. The drawing in Figure 58b is by Felix Farro. Victor F. Vásquez Sánchez and Teresa E. Rosales Tham identified the animal bone and wood samples; and Paul Valentich-Scott, Henry W. Chaney, and Daniel Geiger aided with shellfish identifications. Drone photographs of Taukachi-Konkán taken by Luis Jaime Castillo greatly aided our efforts to produce reconstruction plans of the mound complexes. We also appreciate the help of students Eugenio Garza, Ezgar Chavez, and Amy Longoria as well as our team of workers Mario Castillo, Noemí Castillo, Enrique Flores, Marcos Flores, Pedro Francia, Yulissa Francia, César Isidro, Felix Isidro, Julio Isidro, Henry Lopez, Richard Lopez, Alberto Perez, José Ramos, and Ever Silva. Figures 1 and 47 and black-and-white versions of Figures 49, 51, 53, and 55 were published previously in our article about the friezes in Latin American Antiquity. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, especially for suggestions that expanded the possible interpretations for the frieze court iconography.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental Materials

Supplemental Materials for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/00776297.2020.1804687.