Anna Whittemore
Assistant Professor, Anthropology
University of Virginia
During periods of sociopolitical transformation, humans do not only respond or adapt to their changing circumstances: their actions are the threads that weave the very fabric of these events. Through bioarchaeology, researchers can reconstruct behavior to better understand how periods of change in the past were embodied by the people who constituted them and better characterize the overall phenomena with greater detail and accuracy. In this talk, I will use bioarchaeological and isotopic evidence to examine the sociopolitical transition that occurred at the end of the Middle Horizon (600–1000 CE) and beginning of the Late Intermediate Period (1000–1450 CE) in the Huanca Sancos province of modern-day Ayacucho, Peru—once a key zone of resource acquisition in the pre-Hispanic Wari Empire. While Wari collapse is associated with episodes of intense violence and rapid population movement in certain areas of imperial influence, on the whole this period of transformation was both heterogenous and protracted, a characterization to which bioarchaeological evidence from Huanca Sancos attests.