For anyone who has lived, worked, or traveled the Andes, the ubiquitous presence of ritual practices, activities, spaces, or pasts is inescapable. This timely book, edited by Silvana A. Rosenfeld and Stefanie L. Bautista, presents us with an insight into rituals of the past through the lenses of archaeological, ethnographic, linguistic, and historical analysis. This compilation results from the fruitful symposium, “Ritual Practice in the Andes,” organized by the editors and held at the 2012 Annual Conference of the Society for American Archaeology. The ideas workshopped at that venue came to fruition in this book; the contributions to the volume explore diverse archaeological and historical contexts in which ritual is embedded. The fascination with ritual in Andean anthropology is not fortuitous and has been the focus of attention of several authors, notably Thomas Abercrombie's Pathways of Memory and Power, Catherine Allen's The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community, and Joseph William Bastien's Mountain of the Condor: Metaphor and Ritual in an Andean Ayllu. Rituals act as the binding substance that gives shape to a world, or perhaps a plethora of worlds, in which the lives of beings (human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible) coexist and overlap with each other in this “succession of parallel and transverse mountain ranges, or cordilleras, [that] extend over the modern-day South American countries of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile, and Argentina” (10). From unassuming cairns, shrines, and imposing mountains, dispersed throughout highly heterogenous landscapes, to elaborate ceremonies involving sacrifices and feasts, rituals permeated time and space and provided inhabitants of the Andes with ways to cope with dynamic contexts of cultural, political, economic, and social change.

The volume comprises an introduction written by the editors, 11 case studies in which ritual is evidenced archaeologically, and a closing chapter that offers final comments. The introductory chapter kicks off to a good start by offering ethnographic flashes to the celebrations of the Virgen del Carmen festivities, one among many celebrations that are reproduced along this territory. Fleshing out the “interconnections among the various aspects of society, such as religion, politics, and economy” (4), the editors set a wide and intriguing framework for entering rituals in the past. The initial chapters, written by John Rick and Daniel Contreras, delve into the connections of architecture and ritual in the archaeological site of Chavín de Huántar. Rick explores the importance of the canals and the use of flowing water in the construction of ideological power within the iconic temple of the site; Contreras's emphasis is on a smaller structure related to the Mito tradition, located outside the core area of the monument. A complementary reading of both chapters suggests not only a more complex relationship between competing ideologies between the Chavín and Mito traditions, at least at some point in their history, but also the need to see ritual from a wider angle in which ritualistic practices are tightly related to canals, pathways, and other less formal spaces where ritual is yet embedded.

Yoshio Onuki's chapter studies the temples of Kotosh architecture built during the early Formative period, as part of an extended sociocultural process in which rituals were central for its consolidation. Echoing Contreras’s argument, it provides further evidence about the relatively small scale of labor involved in the construction of such spaces used as part of modest ceremonies, also present at sites such as Caral and Chavín de Huantar, which later developed as important traditions. The architectural spatial analysis of Huaca A at Pampa de las Llamas-Moxeke, developed by Rafael Vega-Zenteno Sara-Lafosse, emphasizes the importance of architectural design in the effectiveness of ritual and ideological discourses. Similarly, the chapter coauthored by David Chicoine, Hugo Ikehara, Koichiro Shibata, and Matthew Helmer presents ritual, mostly related to ceremonial architecture and monumentality, as the tool that naturalizes authority and political and social control over territories. The reconstruction of ritual landscapes achieved through the use of GIS and isovistas, analyzing angles of incidence produced by the height of the architectural remains in relation to the surfaces of the terrain, allows them to argue for the visual importance of such monumentality during Formative times.

The chapter by Matthew J. Edwards focuses on Pataraya, a small site of Wari affiliation in southern Peru. Edwards argues for a case in which the ritual closing of a site is evidenced archaeologically, revealing practices related to ceremonial architecture and signaling its abandonment. Another example dealing with the Middle Horizon societies is the contribution written by Francesca Fernandini and Mario Ruales; what makes this chapter distinguishable from the previous ones is that the authors scrutinize the ambiguity of ritual practices, as permeating the formal and domestic realms of social life. Theoretically nuanced, their argument moves away from the traditional perspective that links ritual to ceremonial architectural contexts, emphasizing rituals as part of a relational process that could be observed in the recurrence of practices evidenced archaeologically. Further on chronologically, Camila Capriata and Enrique López-Hurtado refer to a Late Intermediate to Late Horizon site in the Peruvian central coast. According to them, archaeological evidence within the public architecture of Panquilma reveals how the abandonment of the site was politically and symbolically negotiated through terminal rituals. Rituals not only marked the end of an era symbolically, but were also meant to prevent the reuse or desecration of former ritual spaces.

The last three chapters move the focus away from the usual contexts in which Andean archaeology has commonly centered its attention when it comes to ritual, such as prehispanic ceremonial architecture. And, although Sara Abraham focuses on religious architecture, she does so to scrutinize La Quinta, an early colonial chapel, replaced later by Santa Isabel church, as a place that sheds innovative light on the continuity of Andean elements immersed in new rituals and religious activities. Hybrid ritual expressions speak about power negotiations, appropriations, and amalgamations at the dawn of a new cultural order; the fact that this chapel is built on top of the emblematic site of Pukara suggests that the ritual relevance of the site went way beyond its former abandonment. Through an ethnographic and archaeological analysis, Axel Nielsen, Carlos Angiorama, and Florencia Ávila's chapter provides a fascinating view of ritual as embedded in the construction of landscapes and worldviews. Nielsen and colleagues observe ritualistic aspects of life as dispersed in the vast territory of the southern Andes, implicit in a continuing relationship between human and nonhumans, represented in paths, shrines, and apachetas (cairns), that not only traverses time but also defies colonial and historical borders. Through a linguistic analysis, Hendrik Van Gijseghem and Verity H. Whalen's chapter links ritual to mining practices that, extending far beyond prehispanic times, retained symbolic and ritualistic aspects manifested in a sort of geography of social memory. Toponyms, according to the authors, reveal more than simply spaces, and ritual meanings emerge in a palimpsest of names in the landscape.

The final chapter, authored by Jerry Moore, offers final thoughts on the chapters; I particularly appreciate his frankness and wholeheartedly concur with him when he, being one of the most renowned scholars working on Andean architecture and ritual, asserts that “[archaeologists’] emphasis on ritual within and directed toward architecture is a scholarly bias worth mentioning” (300). The fact that, thematically, a majority of the chapters are concerned mainly with ceremonial architecture and prehispanic contexts, five referring to the Formative period, two to the Middle Horizon, and one about the Late Intermediate Period, supports such an assertion. Additionally, perhaps a warning is in order at this point; despite the title, the volume is rather constrained. Far from exhausting or covering the vast territory of the Andes, the chapters of this volume are rather concentrated mostly in examples spanning over a no less extensive but still restricted territory of the Central Andes, present day Peru, with one exceptional case study from the northwestern Argentine border. In this sense, this volume takes the pulse of archaeological research, showing the mesmerizing effect of monumental works still guiding the agenda of many Andeanist scholars, both theoretically and methodologically.

A good corrective for such bias is the inclusion of contributions that explore ritual in less orthodox settings, one of them dealing with early colonial contexts and another that traverses the archaeological past and ethnographic present, offering archaeological examples of rituals in historical times. Despite these imbalances, the case studies in this volume offer a glimpse of the variety of places, objects, and landscapes that saturate the Andean territories with ritualism. The book will be a useful teaching resource for undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as a valuable source for scholarly consultation. I am convinced that the move to explore more innovative ways to understand rituals, and the past at large, leaving the emphasis on monumentality that has long characterized the archaeology of the Central Andes, is definitely a path to explore further.