Ritual Violence in the Ancient Andes: Reconstructing Sacrifice on the North Coast of Peru ed. by Haagen Klaus and J. Marla Toyne (review)

Ritual violence has been a central theme of iconographic, archaeological, and ethnohistoric research in the Andes since the earliest Spanish accounts of Inca human sacrifice. This volume, edited by Haagen Klaus and J. Marla Toyne, brings together 15 chapters to investigate the diversity of and motivation for ritual violence on the North Coast of Peru over 1800 years. While regionally circumscribed, the chapters document temporal, contextual, and local variation in the nature of sacrifice, the types of victims, and the larger ritual circumstances surrounding these events. Throughout, the authors highlight diverse and innovative methods of analysis and theoretical lenses of interpretation, challenging static models or a "lo andino" approach to Andean ritual violence.

Divided into four sections, this edited volume uses bioarchaeological and archaeological research to emphasize the importance of a broad understanding of sacrifice when investigating ritual killing. The first and longest section of the book primarily explores different case studies of human sacrifice along the north coast, using many methods throughout these chapters to underscore the importance of multiple perspectives. Skeletal data in each chapter is placed in archaeological context and in conversation with regional iconography and patterns at other sites. For instance, in chapter four, Chicoine demonstrates that the iconographic representation of sacrifice (normally throat-slitting or decapitation) and the bioarchaeological correlates of violence may actually miss a more subtle manner of execution: strangulation (118–119). Similarly, in chapter two, Hamilton is able to reconstruct variation in Moche sacrifice by careful analysis of cutmarks on sacrifice victims from two distinct burial areas (62–63). Both these authors (and many others in the volume) challenge previous interpretations of sacrifice on the north coast by engaging multiple lines of evidence: the iconographic record in conversation with skeletal data and material remains.

Beyond the ritual of sacrifice itself, many chapters in the volume address the identities of the sacrificed. As the editors discuss in their introduction to the second section (213), researchers have commonly assumed that victims were persons of low social status or importance to the sacrificers. Drawing upon recent social perspectives in archaeology and bioarchaeology, authors engage with the skeletal data to investigate the lives of the sacrificed prior to their demises. For example, Verano and Phillips consider the common narrative of captive sacrifice, finding that "captive" was not a homogenous category and the sacrifice of captives varied dramatically over time and space (245). In a similar and innovative manner, two chapters (Chapters 12 and 13) focus on the life histories of sacrificed animals and objects. The sacrifice of non-humans has been under-investigated in the literature; these chapters provide models for future research in this vein. While the sacrifice victims discussed in all chapters were from different time periods or cultures, this focus on the diversity of lived experiences of the victims (human or otherwise) is a much-needed perspective in the study of ritual killing more broadly.

The volume concludes with two chapters that articulate this regional perspective with Mesoamerican sacrifice and theoretical trends in the literature. Including these chapters strengthens the volume overall, as these authors (Tiffany A. Tung and Vera Tiesler, respectively) are able to summarize the various themes, underscore the importance of diverse perspectives, and address some gaps in the volume. In particular, Tung questions whether the nature of ritual violence along the North Coast may have not been limited to the ritual sphere but trickled out into daily life for everyone, possibly in the form of domestic or subadult violence (370). The strict focus on ritual may be one weakness of the volume, as most chapters do not make the connection between the act of sacrifice and the impact on the lives of the participants or witnesses. This may fall outside the expressed purpose of the volume but sets forth an intriguing...