A Virú Outpost at Huaca Prieta, Chicama Valley, Peru
Statecraft and expansionary dynamics: A Virú outpost at Huaca Prieta, Chicama Valley, Peru Jean-François Millairea,1, Gabriel Prietob, Flannery Surettea, Elsa M. Redmondc, and Charles S. Spencerc,1 aDepartment of Anthropology, Social Science Centre, The University of Western Ontario, London ON, N6A 5C2, Canada; bFacultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, Trujillo, Peru; and cDivision of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY 10024-5192 Contributed by Charles S. Spencer, July 28, 2016 (sent for review June 20, 2016; reviewed by Joyce Marcus and Charles Stanish) Interpolity interaction and regional control were central features of the rise of a local polity that started “asserting control of regional all early state societies, taking the form of trade—embedded in exchange networks previously held by the intruding core groups” political processes to varying degrees—or interregional conquest (ref.1,p.324). strategies meant to expand the polity’s control or influence over Redmond and Spencer’s work (5, 6, 10–12) has helped docu- neighboring territories. Cross-cultural analyses of early statecraft ment various key aspects of the expansionary dynamics of early suggest that territorial expansion was an integral part of the process states, including annexation strategies, administration practice, of primary state formation, closely associated with the delegation of and issues related to the cooption of indigenous leaders, delega- authority to subordinate administrators and the construction of core tion of authority, and responses to varying conditions of local outposts of the state in foreign territories. We report here on a competition or resistance (see also ref. 7). In a cross-cultural potential case of a core outpost, associated with the early Virú state, comparison of expansionary dynamics in primary state formations, at the site of Huaca Prieta in the Chicama Valley, located 75 km north Spencer (10) highlighted the correspondence in time between the of the Virú state heartland on the north coast of Peru.
[Show full text]