In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER EIGHT Excavation Strategy and Methodology The Research Hypotheses As a result of the 1983 survey several working hypotheses were formulated to explain the skewed settlement pattern for the Early Intermediate Period that was elucidated from the brief 1983 reconnaissance (see fig. 2.7). That survey revealed a plethora of Nasca cemeteries but a paucity of Nasca habitation sites, particularly for the early Early Intermediate Period. Three hypotheses were developed to explain the skewing; they are not mutually exclusive. Hypothesis 1. Nasca graves were located in close proximity to habitation sites, and extreme surface disturbance by looters had obliterated evidence of the latter, causing habitation sites to look like cemeteries. Hypothesis 2. In the lower reaches of the river system, Nasca habitation sites were located in the valley bottom on agricultural land and had been destroyed by centuries of intensive agriculture; cemeteries were located on the valley margins and were consequently preserved; in the upper reaches of the valleys, habitation sites were located on hillsides and were thus preserved. Hypothesis 3. Cahuachi was, as Rowe (1963) and others claimed, a great city. It achieved a great population size and density at the expense of a nearby populated hinterland, particularly along the Nazca River (the Teotihuacan model: see Sanders, Parsons, and Santley 1979: 397-399; Sanders and Webster 1988: 537-539). Rather than ~ontinuingsite survey for my dissertation research, I investigated Cahuachi because I decided that the Early Intermediate Period settlement pattern of the Rio Grande de Nazca drainage could not be interpreted 110 without first adequately understanding what kind of site Cahuachi was and how it had functioned. Because I accepted Rowe's (1963) interpretation of the site as a great urban center, I thought that Cahuachi could provide needed data on the domestic life of early Nasca society while, at the same time, providing an excellent basis for comparison with rural early Nasca habitation sites once these were discovered and excavated. If urban, Cahuachi would confirm the widely accepted state level organization of early Nasca society (see, e.g., Schaedel 1978). From Cahuachi, I hoped to be able to extrapolate a model of how early Nasca society was organized. With its obvious public architecture, I also was inter~sted in whether a residential population had nucleated around a ceremonial focus at Cahuachi, leading to the in situ development of an urban settlement out of a ceremonial center (e.g., Wheatley 1971). Finally, I considered research at Cahuachi to be crucial in assessing the nature and evolution of south coast urbanism as reconstructed by Rowe (1963). Sampling The excavation strategy I went to the field with was based on the hypothesis that Cahuachi was an urban settlement. The 1983 survey of the site had called into doubt Strong's identification of certain of Cahuachi's mounds as habitational but not necessarily the prevailing consensus that Cahuachi was a great city. The mounds were ruled out for testing because their surface features and visible stratigraphy (including Strong's cut profiles from his excavations) indicated them to be nondomestic. If Cahuachi's supposedly great population was not living on the mounds, then the people would have had to live in the open (unconstructed ) areas between them. Two kinds of open areas were recognized: looted and unlooted. As seen in figures 7.1 to 7.4, vast areas in between the mounds are looted. Most of these looted areas are celneteries that contain the vandalized remains of Middle Horizon and Late Intermediate Period tombs. I observed no case in which looting had brought up to the surface cultural materials of a domestic nature from an underlying Nasca context. Rather, I expected to find dense, agglutinated, domestic housing in the extensive unlooted areas of the site. I hypothesized that these areas were unlooted precisely because they corresponded to ordinary habitation zones of little interest to grave robbers. Furthermore, based on Petersen's (1 980) theory of climatic dessication, I thought that these presumed extensive zones of domestic occupation might lie buried beneath a large amount of sand, also accounting for the lack of looting and scarce surface material in certain open areas. . At a site as large and complex as Cahuachi, systematic sampling was clearly the only option. A purposeful (Redman 1975; Morris 1975; Cowgill 1975), nonprobability sampling strategy was chosen because there were "more potential observations than our resources permit us to make [and] we have reason to think that we do not need to make all possible observations in order to obtain...

Share