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- 3 The Wari Empire in the Andean World The Wari Empire expanded from its capital, the site of Huari, in the Ayacucho Basin of modern-day Peru to encompass huge swaths of Andean lands, from pockets of coastal regions to vast sections of productive midvalley agricultural lands and smaller areas of high-altitude mountain zones.Before the Middle Horizon (see table 3.1), no other Andean society had achieved such widespread influence , nor had any group distributed its telltale architectural and iconographic styles to such far-flung Andean regions. Wari administrative sites and architecture in distant locales—from Cerro Baúl in the Moquegua valley of southern Peru to Pikillacta in the Cusco region and Viracochapampa (and other smaller Wari sites) in Huamachuco of northern highland Peru—all point to conquest, collaboration, and/or incorporation of groups that lived far from the Wari imperial heartland. The widespread distribution of Wari textiles and ceramics and the occasional Wari-style trophy head outside of the imperial core further demonstrate Wari’s influence in a vast region, while also showing various levels of interaction with the imperial center. The overall process of Wari imperial expansion—even with its variable intrusion and influence—would have reshuffled local, regional, and supraregional political, social, and economic networks, profoundly affecting conquering and subject groups and perhaps those on the margins (see Barfield 2001; Ferguson and Whitehead 1992). In recognition of the fact that empires rarely use one monolithic strategy to incorporate other communities into their domain, this study aims to document Table 3.1. Andean chronology Time period Dominant polities Dates Late Horizon Inka AD 1450–1532 Late Intermediate Period Regional polities AD 1000/1100–1450 Middle Horizon Wari and Tiwanaku AD 600–1000/1100 Early Intermediate Period Regional polities AD 1–550/600 Early Horizon Chavín 800 BC–AD 1 The Wari Empire in the Andean World  25 variability in imperial and local policies and practices, and how they differentially impacted Wari-era groups.To that end, this study takes a comparative approach , examining life- and deathways in the imperial heartland and the southern hinterland. What were those effects for various peoples living in distinct areas of the Wari realm? And how did peoples’ actions and reactions affect the nature of Wari governance and strategies of control? Much of the recent information regarding Wari imperialism and its effects derives from archaeological data, such as that culled from analysis of architecture , settlement patterns, and portable material culture. Scholars working in the Andes have shown that there were concomitant changes in iconography, architecture , urban planning, settlement patterns, and other aspects of material culture during theWari era,all of which have served to elucidate social and political transformations that may have been instigated by the Wari (Cook 1992, 2001; Czwarno et al. 1989; Isbell 1984; Isbell and Cook 1987; Isbell and McEwan 1991; Isbell and Schreiber 1978; McEwan 1996; Schreiber 1992, 2001; Stone-Miller and McEwan 1990; Treacy 1989; Williams 2001). Despite these pioneering and foundational investigations,however,no studies have analyzedWari-era skeletal remains from both heartland and hinterland populations to assess their population profiles, forms of social organization, prevalence of violence, and rituals of the body. This means that we have an incomplete picture of the important cultural and biological changes related to the rise and dominance of theWari.Thus, this bioarchaeological study contributes new, yet complementary, insights into how the first instance of imperialism in the ancient Andes affected individual and community lifeways. Although the southern, highland Andes was home to the Tiwanaku state, which became a powerful polity approximately fifty or a hundred years before the Wari, those political elites do not appear to have created expansionist policies like those of the Wari, such that large groups of unrelated, distant populations were brought within the Tiwanaku political sphere. Data on settlement patterns, material culture, cranial modification styles (Torres-Rouff 2002), and migration patterns as gleaned through artifactual and settlement pattern data (Goldstein 2005) and strontium isotope analysis (Knudson et al. 2004) suggest that Tiwanaku’s sphere of control was less extensive and hegemonic than that of the Wari. These differences in state strategy, and the ability to carry out expansionistic policies, suggest that Wari state leaders and other Wari agents with decision-making power were the first to develop and execute policies that called for large-scale expansion and incorporation of other communities. Of course,this does not mean that the Wari always successfully implemented their imperial policies, nor does it mean that the...

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