Appropriating Community: Platforms and Power on the Formative Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia.

From Prehistoric Villages to CitiesSettlement Aggregation and Community Transformation

Edited by Jennifer Birch

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First published 2013by Routledge711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

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List of Figures viiList of Tables xiPreface xiii

1 Between Villages and Cities: Settlement Aggregation in Cross-Cultural Perspective 1JENNIFER BIRCH

2 The Anatomy of a Prehistoric Community: Reconsidering Çatalhöyük 23BLEDA S. DÜRING

3 Coming Together, Falling Apart: A Multiscalar Approach to Prehistoric Aggregation and Interaction on the Great Hungarian Plain 44PAUL R. DUFFY, WILLIAM A. PARKINSON, ATTILA GYUCHA,

AND RICHARD W. YERKES

4 Social Organization and Aggregated Settlement Structure in an Archaic Greek City on Crete (ca. 600 BC) 63DONALD C. HAGGIS

5 Appropriating Community: Platforms and Power on the Formative Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia 87ROBIN A. BECK, JR.

6 Social Integration and the Built Environment of Aggregated Communities in the North American Puebloan Southwest 111ALISON E. RAUTMAN

7 Competition and Cooperation: Late Classic Period Aggregation in the Southern Tucson Basin 134HENRY D. WALLACE AND MICHAEL W. LINDEMAN

Contents

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vi Contents

8 Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities 153JENNIFER BIRCH AND RONALD F. WILLIAMSON

9 Community Aggregation through Public Architecture: Cherokee Townhouses 179CHRISTOPHER B. RODNING

10 The Work of Making Community 201STEPHEN A. KOWALEWSKI

Contributors 219Index 223

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Around 400 BC, villagers at the archaeological site of Chiripa, located along the southern shore of Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca, began to expand an earthen platform that visually dominated their settlement. Atop this platform, they erected a compound of fourteen interconnected, stone and adobe chambers arranged around a sunken court. The construction of such large-scale monu-ments is usually considered a hallmark of complex societies. Monumental architecture entails both an investment of labor drawn from many house-holds and the materialization of social institutions and their ideologies of power. The labor demands of such works, together with the cultural nego-tiations required to build them upon communal land, reflects the success of individual leaders or groups at forging bonds that cross factional lines. Their scale is also a material symbol of power and thus can shape as well as reflect the social fabric. Monuments and other public works may justify or reinforce the status of particular individuals associated with their construc-tion or use. Even desecrated, defaced monuments can continue to shape interaction, legitimizing the rejection of one social order and the acceptance or imposition of another.

Chiripa is located on the Taraco Peninsula, a 20-kilometer-long spit of land that reaches into Lake Winaymarka, the small, southern part of Lake Titicaca (Figure 5.1). This area is part of the altiplano, a high, flat, nearly treeless plateau surrounding Lake Titicaca at elevations that exceed 3,800 meters above sea level. The peninsula itself was first occupied about 1500 BC, and by 800 BC it was packed with as many as nine villages; at 7.5 hectares, Chiripa was one of the largest of these (Bandy 2001: 118). Most of these farming villages, small and large, were marked by a novel style of public ritual architecture in which multiple stone and adobe chambers were placed atop an earthen platform, situated so that it commanded the visual geography of each settlement. At both Chiripa and the neighboring site of Alto Pukara, such ritual facilities, which I refer to as platform-chamber com-plexes (Beck 2004, 2007a), were in use by 750 BC (Beck 2004: 336; Hastorf et al. 1997: 61) and served—among other things—as places to keep the bones of the dead (Hastorf 2003). The construction of such complexes just as the peninsula came to be densely packed with settlements was probably

Appropriating CommunityPlatforms and Power on the Formative Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia

Robin A. Beck, Jr.

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88 Robin A. Beck, Jr.

associated with scale-related stress, particularly conflict over the lakeshore’s finite resources (Bandy 2004). By raising a platform and planting the dead within it, a Formative village asserted cosmological rights to its place upon the Taraco Peninsula.

Between 450 and 400 BC, Alto Pukara’s platform-chamber complex and the earliest platform complex at Chiripa—known as the Lower Houses—were ritually sealed. Shortly thereafter, Chiripa’s Upper House complex was built atop the Lower House ruins, although no similar complex was built at Alto Pukara. In fact, Alto Pukara’s platform witnessed no large construc-tion projects after this formal closing. The Upper Houses at Chiripa were a major elaboration of the platform-chamber complex, but what is more important, perhaps, they suggest that political leaders at Chiripa success-fully appropriated from some of their neighbors—like the people of Alto Pukara—sanction to maintain and magnify an active or living platform complex and to manifest the ultimate cosmological authority it conveyed. By monopolizing the platform-chamber complex, at least along this sec-tion of the Taraco Peninsula, Chiripa claimed much more than exclusive rights to a form of architecture, for the platform and its associated cham-bers sustained a rich symbolic load. It transmitted its people’s claims about their primordial past and their place on the land. It materialized the social charters that enabled their common identity—their community—and the inequalities that structured and situated their social lives. To close one’s own platform and to bend to another’s appropriation of its ideology would thus

Figure 5.1 The Southern Lake Titicaca Basin.

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Appropriating Community 89

have been to transform—to subsume or break, perhaps irrevocably—the charters inscribed therein.

Chiripa’s appropriation of platform ideology, and others’ apparent acqui-escence to this dramatic turn of events, was a fundamental episode in the social history of the Taraco Peninsula, and indeed, of the southern Titicaca Basin. With this episode, community was stretched beyond the context of the autonomous village, legitimizing for the first time the integration of a regional institution. Like the genesis of the platform-chamber complex at the beginning of the Middle Formative period, this appropriation was linked to a moment of crisis: sediment cores indicate that Lake Wiñaymarka—which gave lakeshore access to these communities—became almost completely dry by 450 BC (Abbott et al. 1997: 179). In this chapter, I suggest that a crisis triggered by environmental perturbation promoted a new political order, one that materialized a reinterpretation of community at a multicommunity scale through the architecture of the Upper House complex and through the ritual paraphernalia of a basinwide movement known as the Yaya-Mama Religious Tradition.

EARLY PLATFORM COMPLEXES ON THE TARACO PENINSULA

By about 750 BC, Middle Formative villagers on the Taraco Peninsula began to embed sacred propositions in a particular form of shrine, the platform-chamber complex. These sacred propositions legitimized social relationships—rights and obligations—within and between emergent, property-holding constituencies that I have elsewhere argued held many general practices in common with ethnohistorically and ethnographically described house societies (Beck 2007a; for a range of perspectives on the house, see, e.g., Beck 2007b; Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Joyce and Gillespie 2000). In his conception of the term, Claude Lévi-Strauss described the house as a general kinship category, a “type of social structure” (1987: 151) comparable to other kinship categories like the family, the lineage, and the clan. He defined the social house as a

moral person, keeper of a domain composed altogether of material and immaterial property, which perpetuates itself by the transmission of its name, of its fortune and of its titles in a real or fictive line held as legiti-mate on the sole condition that this continuity can express itself in the language of kinship or of alliance, and, most often, of both together. (Lévi-Strauss 1979: 47; Gillespie translation, 2007: 33)

In the southern Titicaca Basin, the platform-chamber complex rooted house members to the bones of their ancestors and the narratives that celebrated their primordial origins. At the same time, the specific arrangement of dif-ferent buildings atop the platform’s summit formalized relations between houses—equalities and inequalities alike—and it was in these relations that

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houses forged their communities. In building a platform-chamber complex, houses anchored their temporally bound political and economic fortunes to those ultimate powers accessed through this specific type of shrine.

Prior to the 1990s, all archaeological research at Chiripa had concen-trated on the central mound, although intensive excavations by the Taraco Archaeological Project (TAP), under the direction of Christine Hastorf of the University of California, Berkeley (e.g., Hastorf 1999, 2003), have now exposed numerous off-mound areas of the site. While there is still little known of the nature and size of Chiripa’s residential settlement, we do have evidence of off-mound public architecture and three large-scale architec-tural complexes within the mound’s stratigraphy: the Lower Houses (Bandy 1999c; Chávez 1988; Kidder 1956), the Upper Houses (Bennett 1936; Chávez 1988; Portugal Ortiz 1992), and a Late Formative sunken court (Browman 1978b). The Lower Houses, so named because researchers once thought the complex to constitute a village of small houses arranged about a central plaza (Bennett 1936; Kidder 1956), are the earliest buildings yet identified in Chiripa’s platform and the earliest known form of raised public architecture in the Titicaca Basin.

A similar platform complex has been identified at the site of Alto Pukara, about 4 kilometers east of Chiripa, and radiocarbon and AMS dating indicate that both the Lower House complex at Chiripa and the Lower House–style complex at Alto Pukara are contemporary. A detailed compari-son of these complexes, along with a detailed description of Alto Pukara’s platform architecture, has been presented elsewhere (Beck 2004, 2007a); as such, I will only summarize the pertinent data here. Alfred Kidder, with his field supervisor William Coe, partially excavated two Lower House cham-bers, labeled House Sub-1 and House Sub-2, along the west side of the Chiripa platform. Houses Sub-1 and Sub-2 were single-walled and separated from each another, unlike the double-walled, interconnected Upper Houses (Chávez 1988: 23). Both structures were built of cobbles, although it is pos-sible that adobes were used in their demolished upper courses. Their walls were thick and cobble-faced on the interior and exterior sides, with the space between faces filled with mud, cobbles, and gravel. Coe found a narrow niche in the northwest corner of House Sub-2; the base of the niche coin-cided with the Sub-2 floor, and both the niche and the floor were plastered with yellow clay (Chávez 1988: 23). Additional niches may have existed, but Coe exposed just a quarter of this structure. We know even less about House Sub-1, since this building was all but demolished by the neighboring hacienda, save for a single wall. Finally, a red clay floor extended at least 4 meters east of House Sub-1 (Chávez 1988: 23). As there is little to suggest that this was part of a sunken temple or plaza, it was probably an outdoor activity area associated with these Lower House structures.

Excavations at Alto Pukara (Figure 5.2) revealed a modest ritual facility consisting of two well-preserved chambers on opposite sides of the plat-form along the same north–south axis. The platform itself was originally

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characterized by a split-level construction, with the southern building, Struc-ture 1, constructed on an upper terrace approximately 60 cm higher than the northern terrace on which Structure 2 was built. An outdoor activity area, located on the upper terrace and just north of Structure 1, was marked by several superimposed red clay floors and at least one stone slab–covered, sec-ondary burial. Structure 1 measured 5.2 meters north–south by 4.2 meters east–west. Its door was in the east wall, just off-center to the south. There were two narrow niches, one in each corner of the west wall, opposite this doorway; at least one, and probably both, extended down to the floor of the building. Structure 2 was 5.4 meters north–south by 4.8 meters east–west. It was oriented to the cardinal directions, and its door (also slightly off-center to the south) was in the west wall instead of the east. The buildings thus formed an inverted pair, with Structure 1 opening to the east and Structure 2 opening to the west. Structure 2 also had at least two adjoining niches on the same side of the structure as the door. Clearly, these paired chambers were built to the same architectural style, but with variability in niche location and doorway placement.

Alto Pukara’s Structures 1 and 2 are of the same architectural tradition as the Lower Houses that Kidder and Coe excavated at Chiripa. Like these, Alto Pukara Structures 1 and 2 were single-walled, lacked storage bins, and were separated from each another, unlike the double-walled, interconnected Upper House structures. At both sites, this architectural style was marked by thick walls cobble-faced on both interior and exterior sides, with the spaces between filled with mud, cobbles, and gravel. The niche in Coe’s House Sub-2 exhibits the same characteristics as the niches revealed in Alto Pukara Structures 1 and 2, while the red clay surface Coe exposed east of House Sub-1 at Chiripa is very similar to the red patios or plazas north of Structure 1 at Alto Pukara. I suggest that this is the earliest known regional tradition of platform architecture discovered in the southern Lake Titi-caca Basin, although its distribution may have been limited to the Taraco

Figure 5.2 Plan View, Structure 1 and Structure 2, Alto Pukara.

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Peninsula. Both structures at Alto Pukara were carefully and formally closed with a sequence of intentional deposits that I describe as ritual entombment (Beck 2004: 334, 2007a: 280). At about the same time, the Lower Houses at Chiripa were dismantled and buried under the Upper House complex. I turn now to offer a description of this complex before exploring the social context of appropriation.

THE UPPER HOUSE COMPLEX AT CHIRIPA

Chiripa’s Upper House complex was discovered by Wendell Bennett in 1934 and has since been examined by every professional archaeological project at the site (Bandy 1999a, 1999b; Bennett 1936; Browman 1978a, 1978b, 1991; Chávez 1988; Hastorf 2003; Kidder 1956; Portugal Ortiz 1992; Portugal Zamora 1940). Given this research, we have a fairly detailed understanding of the complex’s spatial configuration. The Upper House complex consisted of fourteen rectangular, highly standardized rooms, with walls of cobbles and adobes set in mud mortar, arranged in a trapezoid about a central sunken court. Bennett found an opening or entrance on the north side of the complex, between House 1 and House B, and recent geophysical surveys and profile excavations by the Taraco Archaeological Project (Hastorf et al. 1998) located a second entrance on the south side of the complex, between the as-yet unexcavated Houses 7 and H (Bandy 2001: 131). The complex thus was evenly halved into two groups of seven interconnected chambers or rooms, one group on the east side of the mound facing west, the other group on the west side facing east. Numbers 1 through 7 were used to designate Upper Houses on the west side of the complex, while the letters B through H were used to designate Upper Houses on the east side.

The walls of these Upper House structures were probably painted on their exterior faces (e.g., Chávez 1988: 19). Near House 2, Bennett (1936: 445) discovered small clay bricks painted green, white, and red, and he also noted that the exterior wall of this structure, near the doorway, was finished with a reddish clay wash (1936: 425); near House 3, Kidder’s team recovered painted clay bricks and a yellow clay slab with traces of red paint (Chávez 1988: 19). Each of the Upper Houses excavated to date appears to have shared the same basic ground plan, but known side chambers are smaller than the corner structures. The entire complex—not including its stone-faced, earthen platform—measured approximately 48 meters east–west by 45 meters north–south (Chávez 1988: 22).

The Upper House complex appears to have been the earliest to integrate a sunken court or enclosure into a platform-chamber complex. As yet, little is known of the court’s specific architectural features (Browman 1978a), but it appears to have been considerably larger than the earlier off-platform enclosures, if its construction style was similar (i.e., it was probably 20 to 25 meters on a side and faced with cobbles). Kidder and Bennett discovered red

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and yellow clay floors that began at the front exteriors of Houses 1, 2, and 3 and may have connected the structures to the central court; also, the series of superimposed yellow clay floors under Bennett’s Late Formative temple may have been the floors of the Upper House court (Chávez 1988: 18–19). Prior to the Upper House complex, outdoor spaces on platforms appear to have been open patios such as those outside Alto Pukara’s Structure 1 and Chiripa’s Lower House Sub-2. All sunken courts or enclosures known to predate the Upper House complex were off-platform constructions. While most of the features of the Upper House complex are derived from—or were prefigured by—the architectural features of earlier platform complexes, the incorporation of the sunken court into the platform was an architectural innovation, one that prefigured subsequent manifestations of the complex at the Late Formative and Middle Horizon centers of Pukara and Tiwanaku.

Bennett’s excavation of Houses 1 and 2 along the west side of the com-plex provide the best available data on the internal organization of the Upper House structures. House 1, one of the side chambers, had outer walls measuring 6.65 meters east–west by 4.6 meters north–south and were pre-served to a height of approximately 1.1 meters (Bennett 1936: 420–424). The stone foundations of House 1 extended 25 to 30 cm below the interior floor surface, suggesting that House 1, like Structure 1 at Alto Pukara, was refloored on at least one occasion. Like all the Upper Houses, this build-ing had an elaborate double-wall construction that consisted of an interior wall and an exterior wall (Figure 5.3). Both interior and exterior walls were about 25 cm thick, and the space between walls ranged from 45 to 62 cm in width. The inner wall’s perimeter thus formed a central room or chamber covering 4.5 meters east–west by 2.4 meters north–south. Charcoal remains from the fill inside this structure led Bennett to conclude that the chamber had been covered by thatch, but these were the only evidence of roofing materials obtained from the excavations. Given the apparent lack of burned wooden posts or timbers in this fill—or in the fill of House 2—it is likely that any wooden elements of the roofs were dismantled prior to the complex’s ultimate destruction.

The hollow spaces between the interior and exterior walls were partitioned into nine “storage bins” (Bennett 1936: 421). There were two bins each on the west wall and the east wall, three on the north wall, and two on the south wall—one on either side of the doorway. Each of the nine bins had a well-finished, decorative window niche that permitted access to the storage space from inside the room. The base of each window rose about 30 cm above the level of the floor, and the opening itself was 60 cm wide by 50 cm high. A nar-row inset panel, 1.8 cm wide, ran along either side of each niche and ended with a double step fret at the top of the opening, capped with an adobe lintel. As Chávez (1988: 19) observes, the insert panel or double jamb and its double fret step became a hallmark of ritual or high-status sculpture, architecture, and masonry in the south-central Andes, its use continuing at Pukara and Tiwanaku as well as at Inca religious and political centers.

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The base of each storage bin extended to the base of the stone founda-tions, or 25 to 30 cm below the floor of the central room. This, too, suggests that the central room was resurfaced and that the base of the foundations and the bins represents the original floor level. In the excavations of Houses 3 and C (Chávez 1988: 20), Kidder’s excavation team found that the stor-age bins were covered by stone caps approximately 95 cm to 1 meter above the level of the floor, suggesting that adults would not have been able to stand erect inside these bins. Bennett recorded no capstones for those bins in Houses 1 and 2, but their ruins might have lacked sufficient height for such features to have remained intact. Chávez (1988: 23) suggests, correctly

Figure 5.3 Hypothetical reconstruction of the Upper House complex, Chiripa.

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I believe, that Upper House storage bins were elaborated from the preceding Lower House–style corner niches (e.g., the corner niche that Kidder’s team identified in House Sub-2). The walls of House 1’s central room, including its double fret panels, were finished with a yellow clay wash that in several parts of the chamber had been fired to a hard plaster.

The doorway of House 1, on the south side of the building, was slightly off-center to the west and, as with all of the excavated Upper Houses, was divided into two sections: an outer opening and an interior passage. The outer open-ing was 1.4 meters wide and about 75 cm deep. At this point in the door, the walls on either side of the opening turned in at right angles, creating an inner passageway 80 cm across into the central room of the chamber. A narrow slot about 10 cm wide and 80 cm deep (i.e., it was as deep as the passage was wide) was built as part of the east wall of the inner passage, and it extended down to the level of the floor. The slot was divided into two sections—one upper, the other lower—by a row of small flat stones placed across it at the center of the height of the passage. A second row of stones capped the top of the slot. Bennett (1936: 424) observed that the slot probably held a double-paneled, sliding wooden door. The doorway to House 1, that is, had two panels—an upper panel and a lower panel—divided by the lower row of stones. The lower panel rested on the floor, and the upper panel rested on the lower row of stones and was capped by the upper row of stones, 1.1 meters above the level of the floor. To open the door, which would thus have measured about 1 meter high and 80 cm wide, one pushed the panels into the slot, and, as Chávez (1988: 20) notes, the top panel could have been open while the bot-tom was shut. To close the door, one pulled the panels into a vertical groove, 10 cm wide and 10 cm deep, cut into the west wall of the passage. A flat stone set in this groove held the upper panel (Bennett 1936: 424).

The floor of House 1’s central room was a 30-cm-thick, yellow clay sur-face, “well smoothed and packed” (Bennett 1936: 424). It was covered with ash and charcoal, burned clay, fragments of plain and painted ceramics, and bone and stone tools. This assemblage of artifacts certainly contributed to Bennett’s and subsequent archaeologists’ interpretations of the Upper Houses as domiciles, but much of this debris may have been associated with ritual activities and food offerings deposited inside the structure. Likewise, the fired clay and charcoal may have been associated with the use of the floor surface for ritual burning events, in much the same manner as the ash deposits on the interior surface of Structure 1 at Alto Pukara. In the entry-way, south of the slot, the surface of House 1 was paved with cobbles; north of the slot, and for a short distance into the central room, it was paved with five large, flat stones. In the center of the doorway’s passage, between the slot in the east wall and the groove in the west wall, a stone doorsill, 32 cm wide, rose to a height of 30 cm above the floor. Given that the door was only 1.1 meters high, this doorsill restricted the height of the inner passage to about 80 cm, forcing one to enter the central room in a very crouched position, perhaps even on hands and knees.

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House 2, which occupied the northwest corner of the complex, measured 9 meters by 5.75 meters, and while it was therefore larger than House 1, its overall spatial plan was similar. Like House 1, House 2 had nine stor-age bins around a central room, but also had four small decorative niches set into the interior wall—two on the north wall and one each on the east and west walls—between the storage bin windows (Bennett 1936: 425). House 2’s door was single- rather than double-paneled, but was otherwise quite similar to that of House 1, with a long slot in the wall for accepting a door panel. The entire entryway area of House—its outer opening and its inner passage—was paved with large flat stones, with a narrow cobble pave-ment set immediately outside the chamber. House 2, unlike House 1, had no doorsill in its inner passage. Bennett noted that the inner walls of House 2 were better finished than those of House 1, having been prepared with “a thick clay resembling a plaster, apparently fired and slightly polished” (1936: 426). The floor of the central room was made of yellow clay and, like House 1, was covered with ash, charcoal, and artifacts.

Excavations in the storage bins and central rooms have provided valu-able data on the uses of these Upper House structures. Bennett (1936: 424) recovered quinoa from the central floor of House 1 and from one of the bins (Bennett and Bird 1964: 106). Kidder’s team also found plant remains such as quinoa, potato, and ch’unu (freeze-dried potato) in direct association with the Upper House structures (Chávez 1988: 19). Browman’s floated soil samples (Browman 1986) yielded quinoa, tubers, and grasses. Excavations in House 5 conducted by the Taraco Archaeological Project also yielded modest quantities of quinoa and tubers. This low taxa diversity suggests that the Upper House structures were used for special, nondomestic activi-ties (Whitehead 1999: 98). Other food remains likely stored or presented as offerings within the Upper House complex include fish and camelids; serv-ing and storage containers recovered inside the structures include cordage and basketry as well as substantial quantities of decorated and undecorated pottery.

Bennett (1936: 428, 432–433) excavated thirteen burials under the cen-tral floor of the large corner structure, House 2, but no burials were located under the floor of the side structure, House 1 (1936: 426). Most of the House 2 burials (n = 8) were shallow, oval pits marked by stone lining, stone covering, or both. Significantly, seven of the stone-marked graves held the remains of young children or infants; five adult graves in House 2 lacked any type of stone lining or covering. While gold, copper, lapis, and shell ornaments were recovered from several of these burial contexts, only one adult burial—the central grave in the building (Burial CH-H2N) and the only adult with a stone-marked pit—had any exotic offerings. These House 2 data suggest that children and infants usually received different mortuary treatments within the structures than adults. Disarticulated adult human skeletal remains are quite common in the Upper House Level fills (Ben-nett 1936), suggesting that at least some adult remains were preserved in

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above-ground contexts, probably as bundles maintained within the Upper House structures (Hastorf 2003: 324). Having offered a brief description of the Upper Houses, I turn now to evaluate the social context in which Chiripa appropriated platform architecture from neighboring villages.

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF APPROPRIATION

While the Upper House complex appears to constitute less of an absolute novelty than the first platform complexes, its architects (and their patrons or supporters) achieved much more than an elaboration of traditional archi-tecture—the sealing of earlier complexes indicates that villagers at Chiripa actually appropriated the platform and its ideology from smaller, neighbor-ing villages such as Alto Pukara. The care and deliberation exhibited in the final closing events of Structures 1 and 2 at Alto Pukara suggest that Chi-ripa achieved this appropriative act through persuasion rather than coercion and that the houses of Alto Pukara—and presumably other small villages—assented to this turn of events. If such was indeed the case, then there must already have existed at this moment a prevailing cultural logic—a moral canon—according to which events associated with this act of appropriation (i.e., the closing of some platforms and the augmentation of others) might be justified and explained. This fundamental episode in the cultural history of the Titicaca Basin, radical as it was, unfolded within a cultural context that acknowledged dispossession as a legitimate solution to social crisis, and I suggest that the foundations of this logic lay in the ideology of the platform itself. Platform ideology, that is, planted appropriation’s seed.

If, as I have already proposed, platform chambers represent the archi-tecture of the house, places where house members beseeched house dead (Hastorf 2003), then the form, placement, and spatial organization of these chambers strongly suggest that certain house members appropriated access to house dead through the medium of the platform-chamber complex. That is, certain individuals within the house may have positioned themselves as exclusive conduits or intermediaries between the living house and its ances-tors, at least in the context of platform ritual. Between houses, there was a simultaneous appropriation of house origins. For example, the house affili-ated with Structure 1 at Alto Pukara assumed cosmological priority over the house of Structure 2, a claim to which the latter apparently acquiesced, given the organization of the platform (Beck 2007a). In sum, the ideology of the platform legitimized appropriation both of architecture and ances-tors within the house and of cosmological origins between houses. Chiripa’s appropriation of the platform and its ideology, materialized in the Upper House complex, may thus be seen as an especially dramatic but not unprec-edented episode. What was unprecedented was the regional scale of this appropriation, and if the construction of the earliest platforms around 800 BC appears to have been associated with a moment of social crisis, then

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perhaps we should inquire as to whether a similar crisis took place near 450 to 400 BC, when the Upper House complex was built. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, sediments from the bottom of Lake Wiñaymarka indicate that such an episode did, in fact, take place at this time.

Lake Level Change

For societies residing in the Titicaca Basin, any changes to the lake’s water levels may have had major impacts on political and subsistence economies, precipitating social crises. Using sediment cores from Lake Wiñaymarka, Abbot and his colleagues (Abbot et al. 1997) have identified several dra-matic episodes of low lake water level during the late Holocene period. This limnological analysis indicates that the level of Lake Wiñaymarka dropped to 10 to 12 meters below its overflow level, or 16 to 18 meters below the modern lake level, during a 200-year period beginning around 450 BC. While the causes of this event are unclear, it would certainly have had a sweeping impact on the lives of Middle Formative villagers on the Taraco Peninsula. Lake Wiñaymarka is relatively shallow, with most parts of the lake measuring less than 20 meters deep. As a result of this episode, however, it became almost completely dry from 450 to 250 BC. Bandy notes that: “In its place was an immense grassy plain, crossed by small, meandering rivers and dotted with marshes” (2001: 137).

Yet the sudden loss of lake resources would probably have stimulated the rapid intensification of agricultural production, perhaps within the span of a generation, as new, previously inundated lands were brought under cultiva-tion (Bandy 2001: 140). One of the ways that Bandy identifies the shift to intensified cultivation is through an unprecedented importation of olivine basalt hoes into the southern basin. Bandy describes olivine basalt as a “fine-textured, homogeneous gray stone with few crystalline inclusions” (2001: 142), and along the Taraco Peninsula this material is found exclusively in the form of complete and fragmentary stone hoes. The only known source of this raw material is located in the area of Chucuito, south of Puno on the western side of Lake Titicaca, and it is likely that the nearby site of Incatu-nahuiri was a production site for finished hoes (Bandy 2001: 147; Frye and Steadman 2001). TAP archaeologists at Chiripa have, as yet, only identified the material in Middle Formative (Late Chiripa) excavation contexts; there is no evidence for its importation during the Early Formative, and Bandy argues that its exchange may have diminished or ceased altogether during Late Formative times (2001: 142–144). If so, then the quantity of stone hoes imported to the Taraco Peninsula during the Late Chiripa phase is truly exceptional: on the basis of surface collections made during his total survey of the peninsula, Bandy (2001: 146) makes an admittedly rough esti-mate that anywhere from 8.2 to 38 metric tons of olivine basalt—or from 82,000 to 380,000 stone hoes—were imported by Taraco villagers during the Middle Formative period.

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Bandy views the importation of olivine basalt as part of a wider intensi-fication of regional exchange networks during the Middle Formative period and suggests (following Browman 1980 and Murra 1968, among others) that these networks may have integrated the Titicaca Basin with the mid-elevation valleys known as the yungas and the rain forest, or selva, both of which physiographic provinces were located east of the basin beyond the Cordillera Blanca (Bandy 2001: 148). The materials exchanged along these hypothesized trade routes would have included many perishable items, such as wood, feline pelts, coca, cotton, chili peppers, hallucinogenic drugs, and the feathers of tropical birds. Clearly, the increase in basalt hoes during Middle Formative times indicates a shift in social strategies along the Taraco Peninsula, and Bandy’s model attempts to explain these changes through an analysis of interregional trade. I summarize Bandy’s model here, but afterward present an alternative model that explains how the loss of Wiñay-marka’s lacustrine resources may have triggered changes in the relationship between land tenure and the house.

According to Bandy’s model, Lake Wiñaymarka’s drying changed the dynamics of overland trade in the altiplano. Prior to this episode, the short-est exchange route from the yungas to the western lake basin went through the Tiwanaku Valley; following the drying episode, the Taraco Peninsula offered a shorter route. Bandy proposes that llama caravan trade routes between the yungas and the western basin shifted to the peninsula during this period of low lake level to take advantage of the shorter route, and that leaders of the Taraco villages likewise took advantage of this sudden access to exotic goods to forge local followings through strategies of “competi-tive generosity” (Bandy 2001: 148–149). In his scenario, the distribution of exotic materials—including basalt hoes—was controlled by emergent elites at particular villages. Those local leaders with better access to exotic goods acquired more followers than their rivals in neighboring villages, and thereby emerged as a “settlement determinant” themselves (2001: 160), resulting in the late Middle Formative site size hierarchy. The increased pool of surplus labor available to such successful leaders “was fed back into the system via the construction of increasingly elaborate ceremonial facilities” (2001: 160) such as the Upper House complex at Chiripa.

I agree with Bandy that the importation of olivine basalt played a sig-nificant role in how political and subsistence economies changed during the Middle Formative period. I disagree, however, with his broader conclusion that exchange practices, focused on elite control of exotic materials, offered the foundations upon which ambitious individuals and their followings con-stituted social power. There is little evidence that the importation of exotic goods to the Taraco Peninsula—other than olivine basalt—actually increased during late Middle Formative times. Most exotic materials—sodalite and shell beads, metals like copper and gold, and obsidian—were always very uncommon and have been recovered in small quantities from Early and Middle Formative burials and features (Bandy 2001: 140–141; Browman

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1998; Hastorf 2003). Not surprisingly, few of the perishable animal and plant products have been recovered from Early or Middle Formative exca-vation contexts, such that these classes of goods, as yet, shed little light on presumed trade networks. We are left, then, with basalt hoes as the only exotic goods with demonstrably increased rates of importation to the penin-sula from the Early to Middle Formative periods, and I suggest that the sheer volume of the stone imported during this time offers a forceful argument in itself against elite control of its distribution.

Recent data suggest that villagers began to turn gardens into crop fields during the Middle Formative period (Bruno and Whitehead 2003), and this change would only have become more pronounced after the sudden dry-ing of Lake Wiñaymarka. The importation of olivine basalt thus may have had more to do with increased demands for this stone than with a better supply due to relocated exchange networks. I suggest that the importa-tion of basalt would have been more economic (less costly) by means of boats and rafts when Lake Wiñaymarka was full had there been a demand for stone hoes in the southern basin prior to late Middle Formative times. That is, a shift in trade (i.e., supply) routes probably did not bring basalt hoes to villagers along the Taraco Peninsula. Rather, demand from these villagers at this specific time drove the importation of basalt, and I suggest that this novel demand arose from an opportunity seized upon by social houses to increase their holdings and their social leverage through inten-sified farming. Wiñaymarka’s drying opened more areas for cultivation, some of which would have been of better quality than others, having better soils and better access to water. Social houses positioned at villages with access to more and better land would have had greater success attracting new members than houses at villages with poorer land or those at villages with less good land available.

There are important historical parallels to the situation that I have out-lined above, in which a drying episode might have increased the agricultural holdings of well-positioned houses. Erickson (1999: 637) points out that, because of the flat topography of the lake plain, or pampa, a drop of only 1 meter in lake level can expose approximately 200,000 hectares of previously inundated, arable land. He observes:

During the long droughts of the 1860s and the 1940s, enormous areas of lake bed became dry land. These areas have deep, organic-rich soil that is highly prized by local farming communities. . . . My informants in Huatta [in the northern Titicaca Basin, near modern Puno] eloquently spoke both of the horrors of long-term drought and the joy of farming these new lands. They described piles of threshed quinoa and potatoes as large as houses. Huattefios also told of how the communities who control lakeshore territories managed to become “rich” during the droughts by selling the abundant surplus produced on newly exposed lake bed and renting those lands to those less fortunate.

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I suggest that such a situation would likely have confronted Middle For-mative houses on the Taraco Peninsula in the aftermath of Wiñaymarka’s drying. In such circumstances, I propose that access to quality arable land made a more powerful “settlement determinant” than the abilities of any particular leader to acquire and distribute exotic goods, although those lead-ers positioned in better locales for cultivation and, more importantly, for surplus production, would probably have had better access to such exotics. For whatever the precise nature of the feasting and exchange occasions spon-sored by house leaders, the occasions themselves must have been financed through production of agricultural surplus, and surplus, in turn, required access to both arable land and the people to farm it. More and better arable land in this context meant more people, more feasts, and more exotics. The great demand for olivine basalt hoes at this time may thus be seen as less a product of elite appetites for exotic items in general and more a product of house needs for a specific kind of exotic to fully leverage this new opportu-nity for agricultural surplus production.

In the aftermath of Wiñaymarka’s drying, the transfer of land from one generation of house members to the next guaranteed, again, that the houses with the most productive lands quickly compounded their advantages over less affluent houses. In a social context where commensal politics and com-petitive generosity were primary avenues of discourse, these richer houses used such discourse to augment their capacity for allocating structural power (e.g., Wolf 1999). As with the construction of the earliest platform complexes and the concomitant dispossession of many house members from platform ideology, I suggest that this new change in structural power involved an episode of appropriation—in this case, the construction of the Upper House complex at Chiripa. If the earlier appropriation was, in a sense, justified through the novel ideology of the platform itself, then this subsequent act of appropriation may have acquired legitimacy through appeals to a new ideology that was sweeping across the basin at this time, the Yaya-Mama Religious Tradition.

The Yaya-Mama Religious Tradition

In 1975, Sergio Chávez and Karen Mohr Chávez (1975) defined a style of Middle Formative carved stone slabs and stelae that they referred to as the Yaya-Mama style. In a subsequent article, Karen Chávez (1988) proposed a more broadly defined Yaya-Mama Religious Tradition (hereafter referred to as YMRT) that incorporated the stone sculpture, ritual architecture such as the Upper House complex, and paraphernalia such as decorated ceramic tubes or trumpets and slipped and painted serving vessels. The term Yaya-Mama combines the Quechua words for male (“father” or yaya) and female (“mother” or mama) and refers to the male and female anthropomorphic figures carved onto the type of sculpture recovered in the northern basin town of Taraco, Peru (Chávez and Chávez 1975: 46). The Yaya-Mama style

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has also been named the Pa-Ajanu style (Portugal Ortiz 1981, 1998) and the Pajano style (Browman 1980), although Yaya-Mama has gained a more common usage (e.g., Bandy 2001; Hastorf 2003; Stanish 2003).

All of the known examples of Yaya-Mama stone sculpture, as defined by Chávez and Chávez (1975: 57), are stelae or slabs, with no statues cre-ated in the round. The most common motif is an anthropomorphic face or head with round eyes, a T-shaped nose and eyebrows (although sometimes the eyebrows curve over the eyes, forming a V at the bridge of a trapezoid-shaped nose), and an open mouth in the form of an oval relief band. Often the figure has a mouth mask and a high head ornament with a zigzag or serpentine design (Chávez and Chávez 1975: 58). When the body is shown, its arms are usually folded over its chest, one hand above the other with palms flat. Other motifs include long, undulating serpentlike figures with ears and triangular heads; quadrupeds, depicted in profile, often with tails curled back over their hindquarters; frogs or toads, shown from above or below; relief rings; and a rootlike motif that, as yet, has only been reported on the type-monolith known as the Taraco stela. The field of composition is characterized by the integration of many motifs on a single sculpture, but an anthropomorphic figure is usually the dominant motif. Standing sculptures are typically carved on all four sides, and Chávez and Chávez note that there was a tendency to fill the composition’s space with many motifs, “so as not to leave large empty areas” (1975: 59). The crafters of Yaya-Mama sculp-ture emphasized symmetry and complementarity in composition and design, often carving paired sets of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figures. All of the carving on Yaya-Mama sculpture was produced in a low-relief tech-nique. Known monoliths range in height from 1.1 meters to more than 2.5 meters, and the smaller carved slabs measure 35 to 50 cm high by 30 to 37 cm wide (Chávez and Chávez 1975: 57).

As noted, Karen Chávez (1988) considered Yaya-Mama stone sculpture to be but one element of a more broadly conceived Yaya-Mama Religious Tradition; other features of the YMRT, thus defined, include molded ceramic trumpets, painted serving bowls and ring-based burners, and any combination of earthen platform, stone chamber, and sunken court architec-ture. While a broad definition of the YMRT certainly helps to contextualize the religious practice of carving and displaying Yaya-Mama sculpture, it is now clear that the different constituent features of the YMRT have different social histories (e.g., Bandy 2001; Hastorf 2003; Stanish 2003). For exam-ple, the platform-chamber complex may be traced to the very beginning of the Middle Formative period. Ceramic trumpet fragments and quanti-ties of decorated serving vessels were recovered at Chiripa in the Llusco sunken enclosure, which dates from around 800 to 400 BC, and the form of the sunken court itself is at least as early as the Choquehuanca enclosure, around 1000 to 800 BC. The only feature of the YMRT that was truly novel at 400 BC is the practice of carving and planting or otherwise displaying large stone sculptures, and I suggest that the YMRT, as such, holds together

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as a distinct religious movement only for the time that artisans were carv-ing Yaya-Mama stelae and slabs. This is an important point, for, as Charles Stanish (2003: 132) suggests:

I believe that the existence of stelae on a site represents the emergence of an elite that was identifying with a larger, pan-regional ideology. Stela construction was rare, restricted to a few dozen or so sites around the Titicaca Basin. It is likely that the existence of a stone stela indicated that a particular site was a regionally important center with a resident elite actively engaged in the political competition of the time.

It thus should come as no surprise that the Upper House complex at Chiripa, as yet, is the only known place on the Taraco Peninsula where Yaya-Mama stone sculptures have been discovered (e.g., Bandy 2001; Browman 1980; Portugal Ortiz 1998).

It is, of course, difficult if not impossible to interpret the specific meanings of any of the Yaya-Mama motifs (e.g., Stanish 2003: 132), and, indeed, dif-ferent motifs may have held a multitude of meanings and may have meant different things to different people, or on different occasions. However, I do suggest that the narratives manifested in this stone sculpture probably derived from, and elaborated upon, the cosmological ideals expressed in the architec-ture of the platform-chamber complex—namely, an emphasis on primordial house ancestors and house origins. In this regard, anthropomorphic faces and bodies and cross motifs may be especially significant. The anthropo-morphic images that figure most prominently in Yaya-Mama stone sculpture may reference the primordial house ancestors at their moment of creation or emergence, and if Chávez and Chávez (1975) are correct in suggesting that male–female duality is expressed in the instances of paired human images (as the term Yaya-Mama itself implies), then such anthropomorphic figures may actually portray an emergent brother–sister pair (Figure 5.4).

The cross motif in Yaya-Mama stone carving, which may be represented as either a checkered cross or cross formée, may have been a precursor of the Andean cross, an image that is conspicuous in later Tiwanaku art and architecture (e.g., Kolata 1993: 104; Stanish 2003: 172–173). I suggest that the Andean cross is a representation of the platform-chamber complex, and thus of the primordial mountain of origins, and I believe that the early cross motif in Yaya-Mama sculpture likewise depicts the mountain from which house ancestors stepped forth (and thus the platforms on which their descendents built the stone chambers for their veneration). If so, then the cross formée frame or border surrounding each of the known Yaya-Mama slabs (Figure 5.5) suggests that the narrative events depicted upon these carvings took place at the mountain of origins; that is, the slabs themselves may reference the body of the primordial mountain. Animal images may refer to events along the ancestral pair’s journey from the mountain, and the presence of water-related imagery such as frogs and undulating serpents

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may reference the water-bringing or water-controlling powers of the original ancestors (Hastorf 2003: 325). By explicitly joining themselves to ancestors who possessed such powers, houses participating in the YMRT may have sought to emphasize their own abilities in this regard, at a time when the drying of Lake Wiñaymarka seems to have precipitated social crisis.

Figure 5.4 Yaya-Mama monolith, Taraco, Peru, H. 221 cm, W. 22 cm (after Chávez 1988: Fig. 5).

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Figure 5.5 Yaya-Mama slab, Chiripa, W. 37.5 cm, L. 53 cm (after Chávez 1988: Fig. 4a). The border of this slab was formed by notches cut into its corners (Chávez and Chávez 1975: 55), actually making a cross formée of the slab itself.

CONCLUSIONS

Bandy (2001: 132–133) has argued that the architectural redundancy of the Upper House complex—the symmetrical organization of multiple similar buildings—indicates a segmentary social structure, in which each building

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in the complex was probably linked to a different social segment or constitu-ent group within the village, although, as I argue in this final section of the chapter, it is possible that those constituent groups with access to the Upper House complex were not limited to Chiripa but may also have included those groups from villages such as Alto Pukara. I agree with Bandy’s key point, however, and further suggest that each of the Upper House structures was the architecture of a distinct social house. Like Alto Pukara’s earlier platform-chamber complex, the Upper Houses at Chiripa display a clear bilateral symmetry, with seven structures along the east side of the plat-form facing west and seven along the west side of the platform facing east. Although it is unclear whether status differentiations were associated with this east–west symmetry, as at Alto Pukara, mortuary data from the Upper House complex—which manifests a clear emphasis on house dead (Hastorf 2003: 324)—do suggest that some houses were older and more affluent than others: certain buildings, such as Houses 2 and C, had multiple burials interred with exotic materials such as copper, gold, and sodalite; other struc-tures, such as House 1, had neither burials nor exotics. As Bandy (2001: 133) suggests, this variation indicates that “leaders and their constituen-cies had begun to differentiate, with some commanding more wealth, labor, prestige and authority than others.” While I believe that wealth and status differentiations were clearly expressed in the earliest platform complexes, such distinctions likely became even more pronounced after 450 BC.

Lake Wiñaymarka’s drying, although probably catastrophic for the Taraco villages in its initial aftermath, may have offered socially and ecologically well-positioned houses vast opportunities both to acquire new members—particularly from less well-placed houses—and to augment the production of agricultural surplus, allowing them to amplify existing inequalities through their strategic deployment of structural power. Chiripa’s appropriation of the platform-chamber complex represents precisely such a deployment and testifies to the success of its social houses at negotiating these newfound opportunities. The social sanction for their appropriation of the platform and its ideology certainly derived from traditional appeals to and claims about the sacred, materialized through participation in the basinwide movement known as the Yaya-Mama Religious Tradition, and especially through the carving and planting of Yaya-Mama stone sculpture. Because Chiripa is the only site along the Taraco Peninsula where such carvings are known to have been displayed, elite houses at Chiripa may have positioned themselves as exclusive conduits to the primordial ancestors depicted on Yaya-Mama sculpture. Helms (1988, 1998) has devoted considerable research to the relationships between geo-graphical and cosmological distance, and following her perspective, it seems likely that elite houses at Chiripa harnessed sacred authority derived from these dimensions of the remote. Their participation in the YMRT joined them to geographically and cosmologically distant elite houses in other parts of the basin, and simultaneously limited their indirectly participating neighbors from accessing this source of authority in a similar manner.

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The possibility of indirect participation in the Yaya-Mama movement by Chiripa’s neighbors is significant, for it is likely that while Chiripa appropri-ated the social sanction to build and maintain an active platform, the social houses of this village probably did not monopolize house architecture. That is, given the relatively large number of chambers in the Upper House com-plex, it is unlikely that sanction to access this facility was restricted to those social houses having residence at Chiripa (Hastorf 2003: 327). Instead, houses at villages such as Alto Pukara may have “owned” one or another of the Upper Houses. The construction of the Upper House complex was probably, as such, a truly regional episode along this section of the Taraco Peninsula and undoubtedly manifested a reinterpretation of house and com-munity. By transforming the agenda on house and community in such a manner as to restrict neighboring villages from direct access to platform and Yaya-Mama ideology, and to promote their indirect access through platform ritual at Chiripa, the elite houses at Chiripa probably made acquiescence to their appropriation of platform ideology more acceptable and secured their own positions in this new political order. Chiripa itself may have acquired the character of a local, small-scale pilgrimage center, the place where houses at nearby villages such as Alto Pukara came to placate and beseech house dead. If this was the case, then activities surrounding the construction and use of the Upper House complex would clearly have transformed how Middle Formative villagers conceptualized community. No longer was this principle—as materialized in platform ideology—bound to the village, but now and for the first time it legitimized a regional institution.

This brings us back to the construction of the Upper House complex. The Upper Houses constitute, in part, a spatial rearticulation of structures transformed in a cascading series of occurrences. But rearticulation here is also constituted in the ceremonial closing of an earlier complex at Alto Pukara, such that the moment of rearticulation entailed both an act of appropriation—as materialized in Chiripa’s Upper House complex—and an act of acquiescence—as materialized in Alto Pukara’s loss. The closing of Alto Pukara’s facility seems not to have been an act of violence but rather a careful and deliberate performance that was likely enacted by the very people who used it (Beck 2004: 341). They submitted, that is, to the loss of their own complex just as the Upper House expansion at Chiripa was underway. Moreover, given the considerable scalar disparities between ear-lier complexes and the monumental Upper Houses, Chiripa’s expansion may actually have demanded the labor and tribute of nearby villages such as Alto Pukara.

This is not to suggest, however, that the site of Alto Pukara was no longer a locus of community after Chiripa’s appropriation of its platform architec-ture; nor is it to suggest that the people of Alto Pukara thereafter belonged to two different communities—one local, one regional. Rather, I suggest that this episode changed how villagers on the Taraco Peninsula situated themselves in community, and that after construction of the Upper Houses,

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Chiripa and Alto Pukara might have coexisted as separate, if unequal, loci of the same community. From approximately 800 to 400 BC, the platform and its ideology materialized community at multiple loci on the Taraco Pen-insula. But after 400 BC, community was materialized in this medium and along this section of the peninsula only in the Upper House complex at Chi-ripa. The social charters that I suggest were inscribed in the earlier platform complexes were reconstituted or reconfigured in a single place, even as the older platforms remained a part of the social landscape, visible testaments both to the past and to their constituencies’ ongoing participation in—and concomitant legitimation of—the novel synthesis of house and community chartered at Chiripa.

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