As happenstance would have it, both the papers in this issue take us on a journey to Inca period Argentina, though focusing on somewhat different aspects. In the first paper, “Approaching Imperial Narratives One Sense at a Time: Views and Sounds at an Inca Settlement in Northwest Argentina”, Alejandro Ferrari and colleagues explore the architectural layout of Guitián, in the North Calchaqui Valley. The Incas were incredibly successful in colonising huge areas of territory surprisingly quickly, relatively speaking; they used as one of their key imperial strategies the institution of highly ritualized celebratory events in order to engage and control the local societies they were colonising as well as to instil the Inca social and cosmological worldview. The authors examine the spatial design of Guitián “with the intention of establishing whether or not the Incas strategically employed architecture to manage visual and aural accessibility and, thus, to create disparate forms of participation in ritual events”. They analyze the public spaces of the settlement combining both visual and acoustical data. These are then assembled and presented in this paper using “three-dimensional modelling of terrain, architecture and sound propagation”. It is this latter sonic aspect that makes this piece of research especially interesting.
In the next paper, “Rituals and Abandonment in Juella with the Inca Conquest of Humahuaca, Jujuy, Argentina”, author Iván Leibowicz concerns himself with what might be described as the archaeology of abandonment. In this particular case, he makes a detailed analysis of the material remains of one enclosure in the pre-Inca site of Juella “related to ritual and ceremonial activity of the closure and also the symbolic ‘death’ of this space”. Using radiocarbon dating, he identifies the closure activity as belonging to the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1250–1450), linking the site to the Inca conquest of the region. Leibowicz presents this paper as one of only a very few archaeological examples testifying to the abandonment of a particular settlement.
Book reviews this time involve these publications: Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Classical Antiquity; Early Medieval Stone Monuments: Materiality, Biography, Landscape; A Geography of Offerings: Deposits of Valuables in the Landscapes of Ancient Europe, and The Idea of North. The reviewers are, respectively, Bob Trubshaw, Ethan Doyle White, Ceri Houlbrook, and Laura Slack.
It just remains for us to wish readers everywhere an enjoyable solstice.