The village is the hearth of culture. Temples, tombs and lost cities fire the romance of popular archaeology, but since the advent of sedentism most past lives were lived within the horizons of quiet hamlets. It is the rural village, composed of individuals, that makes possible the superstructure of regional society. If we aspire to document and explain culture, we must also encounter it at its genesis – in village life.
The Nasca culture of Peru's south coast (c. 1–750 AD) is best known for its fine textiles, brilliant polychrome pottery, gigantic geoglyphs (the Nasca Lines) and the ceremonial centre of Cahuachi. Yet for most of the last century, what was known of the Nasca people came primarily from their graves; the domestic context was a virtual blank. More recently, a decade of field surveys directed by Katharina Schreiber in the southern Nasca drainage provided rich data on Nasca settlement patterns through time and identified promising sites for intensive excavation. Among these was Marcaya, an Early Nasca village on a hillside overlooking the Tierras Blancas River, 16 kilometres upstream from the modern city of Nasca. Marcaya provided a unique opportunity to study an ancient village in its entirety, at both the household and regional levels. This is precisely what Kevin Vaughn does in his new book, providing the first empirically based study of the village economy and power relations of the Nasca.
In the opening chapters, Vaughn frames his work within the broader context of anthropological theory, focusing on agency (individuals as agents of change) and political economy (how elites establish and maintain power). From archaeological theory he adopts a village approach which first identifies material correlates of households and then views local and regional processes from the perspective of these minimal units. Ultimately he is headed towards an evaluation of Nasca society in terms of power and inequality, economic organisation (including subsistence and political economies), and ideology expressed in ritual.
A thorough historical overview of Nasca archaeology provides context for this study and brings the reader up to speed on contemporary issues. To determine the place of Marcaya in regional Nasca politics, Vaughn must, of necessity, replay the debate over the size and complexity of Nasca society. At one time considered a conquest state with all the institutions of statehood, most archaeologists now regard Nasca as a form of the chiefdom construct (Markus Reindel and Johny Isla Cuadrado being notable exceptions). But Vaughn eschews the vagaries of static neoevolutionary typologies, and for Nasca instead favours the term ‘middle-range society’. We must agree that ‘chiefdom’ is an amorphous label, including everything from a single village dominating one or two others up to a society on the verge of true statehood with hundreds of towns under a hereditary paramount chief. Robert Carneiro pointed this out long ago, and proposed finer distinctions of minimal, typical and maximal chiefdoms, to which is added the idea of ‘complex societies’ for the overlap between maximal chiefdoms and early states. What the term ‘middle-range society’ has going for it is that it is not neoevolutionary. On the other hand, is it any more precise than ‘chiefdom’? Typology is not Vaughn's concern: his book examines agency and power in Nasca society (call it what you will).
Marcaya is bite-size; a one-hectare site, intact, with stone walls a metre high outlining 23 patio groups (one or more round houses adjoining one or more walled patios) and 13 isolated structures. Vaughn excavated 206 square metres sampling ten houses, five patios, and eight isolated enclosures. Three radiocarbon dates overlap in the 370 to 420 AD range. In Dawson's Nasca pottery seriation, all ceramics are from stylistic phases 3 and 4.
Separate chapters describe excavations, pottery and non-ceramic finds. Status differences at Marcaya are marked by the size of patio groups, quality of architecture, and artefact distributions. Vaughn found that all households were economically self-sufficient and participated in a mixed economy primarily based on local crops (maize, squash, beans, etc.), along with some herding at higher altitudes and occasional supplements of marine resources. The community of Marcaya did not have a ‘temple’ or separate structure for communal ritual or feasting; rather, consumption and ritual happened in the household context.
Craft production also took place at the household level. Of special note is Vaughn's finding that the famous Nasca polychrome pottery was not produced at Marcaya (contrary to this reviewer's published hypothesis that it was all manufactured at the local village level). Extensive paste and pigment sourcing undertaken by Vaughn and his colleagues demonstrates that most Early Nasca ceramics were manufactured at or near the great ceremonial centre of Cahuachi. Vaughn argues that control of production and distribution of polychromes, with their elaborate iconography of imaginary creatures and gruesome activities representing ‘materialized ideology’, was a fundamental means of attaining power in a society where households were economically independent.
Appropriate use of Andean village ethnographies provides potent analogies. Vaughn concludes with the view that Nasca society was composed of relatively self-sufficient villages, regionally integrated through periodic ritual and feasting at Cahuachi. Such gatherings, he posits, were sponsored by elites who controlled the production and distribution of polychrome ceramics. These elites may have been ‘priest/shamans’ who lived at Cahuachi and actually made the pottery, or they may have been affiliated with such individuals.
This slim volume is a landmark work for Nasca archaeology and essential reading for Andeanists dealing with the village approach. It also belongs on the shelves of all archaeologists interested in the larger questions of agency and economy in middle-range societies.
