Death, personhood, and relatedness in the South Andes a thousand years ago

Abstract

This article examines the nature of personhood in the Calchaquí region, in the South Andes, during the second part of the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1250-1450). Through the study of the location of graves, architecture, and offerings, the authors explore the type of personhood that Calchaquí communities built and represented through the materiality of funerary practice. They claim that in this cultural and historical context, death became a realm in which relatedness was interwoven. Death, symbolically and materially, built bridges, connecting and entangling people with place and with each other. The funerary sphere was not strategically used to celebrate particular biographies and personal accomplishments, but rather it was another realm, like daily life, where individual identity dissolved into place and into the collective.

Burying the Dead at Ayawiri: Mortuary Diversity and Postmortem Manipulation at an Andean Hillfort (AD 1100–1450)

“…Did our limited excavation sample, which could not include more elaborate (but looted) tombs from the southeastern portion of the site, simply miss what may have been a rare and exceptional grave offering? Although these questions are difficult to address from the available evidence, we can compare Ayawiri to contemporaneous burial practices at late LIP settlements in the Calchaquí region of Argentina, where the lines between domestic and mortuary realms were thoroughly blurred (Acuto et al 2014). Circular cist tombs were mostly placed near or within residential compounds, and household items are regularly found in graves.…”