Blackwell Reference Online

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No matter how well prepared the traveler might be, no amount of reading, video viewing, or web surfing can come close to the experiences of standing in the ruins of an adobe city that stretches for kilometers or viewing ancient irrigation systems flowing with water and cut-stone terraces still under cultivation in the Central Andes. The ubiquity of the material remains of prehistoric cultures and the pervasiveness and tenacity of old life-ways make a deep impression on both laypeople and scholars alike. In studying the Andean past, one approach may be termed “civilizational,” in which studies are carried out in the emic mode, attempting to understand ancient cultures on their own terms. At the other extreme, some archeologists have engaged with the remains of the past as in a New World “laboratory” to examine large anthropological issues on the origins of plant and animal domestication, the evolution of political economies, and similar issues from an etic perspective. Many scholars fall somewhere between these two extremes. In this essay, I will present information drawn from both kinds of approaches. I will begin by discussing the spatial, temporal, and formal dimensions of the domain of study and then follow with a broad narrative of the culture history of the region as commonly and currently accepted ( Richardson 1994 ; Moseley 2001 ; Stone-Miller 2002 ; Quilter 2006 ). The ... log in or subscribe to read full text