This edited volume comprises 12 chapters written by scholars from Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, and the United States that cohere around a common interest in exploring the notion of Andean ontologies. The origins of the volume lie in a symposium organized by the editors for the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in 2016. The book includes many of the papers presented in that forum, together with a few additional contributions, including a thoughtful concluding chapter by Catherine Allen. Although a handful of the authors treat Andean phenomena more generally (e.g., Mary Glowacki's discussion of human heads in Andean iconography in Chapter 7, and Bruce Mannheim's constructivist focus on Quechua language and associated frames of reference in Chapter 9), the majority center on specific sites with the aim of garnering insights into native ontologies via the archaeological evidence. Contributors use a variety of interpretive approaches and methods to gain entry to potentially distinct ways of knowing and being in the precolumbian world.
The opening chapter by Henry Tantaleán introduces the volume's principal construct: the idea of an Andean ontology (or ontologies) distinctive from that (or those) of the West. He first outlines the sources from which archaeologists may derive insights into Andean ontologies—ethnohistory, iconography, ethnography, and the native language—and then provides an overview of various keywords such as pacha, camay, huaca, and the like. Tantaleán describes Andean ontologies, however one gains access to them, as a source both of testable hypotheses and interpretive inspiration. Throughout the chapter, a tension seems to exist between the idea of exploring Andean ontologies via the archaeological record versus using ontology as a heuristic to explain archaeological phenomena (i.e., as something good to think with). The subsequent chapters tend to follow one of these two tracks of working with the notion of ontology—a concept that one could argue has become so expansive here as to be in danger of forfeiting its semiotic value.
After the introduction, the book leads with a chapter by Richard Lunniss, who focuses on the coastal Ecuadorian site of Salango, a sacred locale that served as a center of ritual activity for several millennia beginning in the Late Formative period. Through detailed analysis of the architectural history of the site, the distribution of offering deposits, mortuary patterns, and associated artifacts, Lunniss seeks to reconstruct the ontology of the ancient inhabitants of this often-overlooked sector of the Andean realm. Authors Nicco La Mattina and Matthew Sayre move the discussion in the next chapter to the site of Chavín de Huántar, where they similarly aim to identify the ontological orientation of Formative period congregants via the archaeological evidence. Theirs is an exercise in demonstrating that Chavín iconography is a closer fit with Descola's category of analogical ontology than with that of animism. Shifting the analytical orientation, María Cecilia Lozada looks to ethnohistoric and ethnographic data as a source of hypotheses regarding emic understandings of the body, life cycles, and disease in Chapter 4 to inform her bioarchaeological study of a large mortuary assemblage from Chiribaya Alta and several other sites in southern Peru. Seeking insight into how bodies and individuals figured in local indigenous ontologies during the Late Intermediate and Middle Horizon periods, she investigates correlations between biological age and categories of associated funerary objects, as well as the mortuary treatments of diseased individuals.
Chapter 5 by Luis Armando Muro, Luis Jaime Castillo, and Elsa Tomasto-Cagigao—centering on the late Moche site of San José de Moro on the north coast of Peru—is similarly concerned with the ontological status of the body. This study focuses on the human remains associated with a set of elite mausoleums uncovered at San José de Moro. Based on their analysis, the authors suggest that the Moche operated within an ontological framework that construed the body as a process, periodically transformed through social interventions, rather than as a permanently stable thing—an orientation they refer to as a “corporeal ontology.” In another study from the north coast (Chapter 6), Giles Spence-Morrow and Edward Swenson explore the ontological order of late Moche society as revealed through investigations at the site of Huaca Colorado. Focusing on the multiple episodes of architectural renovation and associated ritual sacrifice that occurred in the ceremonial sector of the site, the authors develop an interpretation of the evidence that emphasizes corporeal interdependencies and the interrelationship between parts and wholes. This leads them to attribute a synecdochal ontological orientation to the Moche people of this era, one that corresponds to Muro and colleagues’ premises, at least in terms of the significance of relationality and corporeal agency.
Benjamin Alberti and Andres Languens's contribution in Chapter 7 offers a reflection on the potential of Amazonian perspectivism to inform a new archaeology of landscapes. Taking as their starting point the idea that bodies and landscapes are mutually constituted, they argue for a new ontological understanding of the body wherein it is viewed as multiple rather than as singular and universal. Assessing the utility of this ontological orientation in the context of the La Candelaria culture of Northwest Argentina, they present alternative explanations for why stylistically similar pottery might be found across distinct environmental zones. In their discussion, the authors approach ontology (e.g., perspectivism) as a heuristic for developing a different interpretation of the archaeological evidence comprising the La Candelaria culture. In the next chapter, Juan Villanueva similarly works from the ontological orientation of contemporary indigenous peoples—in this case, the Aymara of the Bolivian altiplano—to interpret changes in the ceremonial assemblages from three archaeological sites in the Titicaca Basin. He frames his discussion in terms of native notions of time and its inextricable linkage to space, as expressed in the concept of pacha. Arguing that the same ontological orientation could be differentially enacted at different moments in time, he reads diachronic changes in the archaeological record from an ontological perspective, suggesting that relations between the temporal dimensions of the past (i.e., the dead) and present (i.e., the living) changed over time in materially legible ways.
In the penultimate chapter of the volume, Andrés Troncoso offers an ontological analysis of a 3,500-year sequence of rock art production in the Valle El Encanto in north-central Chile. Emphasizing the historically constituted nature of ontologies, he works from the archaeological record to gain insight into the changing ontological orientations of the precolumbian inhabitants of this valley. Troncoso approaches the ecology of the valley as an assemblage comprising both human and nonhuman entities (including landscape features) whose capacities and relations vis-à-vis one another—as evidenced by different types and placements of rock art—changed over time. In the concluding chapter, Catherine Allen offers several insightful observations that serve to both ground the contributions pragmatically and draw out common themes, including the utility of thinking through indigenous concepts, theorizing the body, and the significance of relationality in the Andean world.
In sum, this volume offers insight into the wide range of orientations and investigations gathered under the banner of the ontological turn in Andean archaeology. To paraphrase Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro (https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-politics-of-ontology-anthropological-positions), the ontological turn is about making “the otherwise” visible by experimenting with the conceptual affordances present in a given body of material—be it a body of practices, discourses, or artifacts—and all such materials are amenable to ontological analysis. The chapters in this volume demonstrate the variety of ways such analyses may be formulated, the directions in which they may lead, and the potential they may hold for interpreting the archaeological record.
