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

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE The Significance and Broader Context of Cahuachi For years scholars have tried to explain the conditions that produced the wide areal distribution of an essentially homogeneous Nasca style. In considering the sociopolitical context of the famous Nasca style and especially the political significance of the concentration of ceremonial behavior at Cahuachi, one of the thorniest problems is to determine how the term "political" should be defined. For the purpose of this chapter, I will consider "political" to refer to the culturally sanctioned intent to get others/other groups to do one's/one's group's will, to the "distribution, maintenance, exercise of, and struggle for power within a social unit," with "power" referring to relations of domination and subordination (Cohen 1979: 88). I recognize that many other definitions of "political" exist, but this definition is appropriate to the state-nonstate debate that has guided much of recent Nasca research and which will be considered in this chapter. Most commonly, the wide areal distribution of an essentially homogeneous Nasca style has been correlated with the expansion of a centralized state led from Cahuachi in the Nazca valley (see Rowe 1963: 11-12; Lanning 1967: 121; Proulx 1968: 96-97; Lumbreras 1974a: 123-124 ; Massey 1986). I originally rejected that notion and interpreted early Nasca society as a religious interaction sphere (Silverman 1977). Then, on the basis of the data collected at Cahuachi in 1984-1985, I reconstructed the early Nasca political landscape as a conglomerate or confederation of coordinating and competing independent Nasca societies/chiefdoms (Silverman 1985a, 1986). More recently, influenced by newly available data for the upper Ica valley (Massey 1986) and in 320 conjunction with the existing Acari data (Rowe 1963; Menzel and Riddell 1986), I accepted and propounded the state model (Silverman 1987, 1988a). As a result of the Ingenio-middle Grande survey data, I have since returned to my previous interpretation of Nasca society as a flexible confederacy of independent societies on a chiefdom level of sociopolitical complexity. The models of Nasca sociopolitical organization are reviewed below, andthe evidence for and against them is presented. The chapter concludes with a trial reconstruction of ancient Nasca society and a cautionary statement about the use of a unilineal cultural evolutionary paradigm for the interpretation of ancient Andean social formations and as a goal of archaeological investigation. Modell: A State Model 1 is the model of early Nasca society that was originally put forth by Rowe (1963) to explain the ceramic homogeneity found over a large part of the south coast during the Early Intermediate Period. According to this model, Cahuachi was the capital of a centralized state or militaristic empire. The widespread distribution of a 'homogeneous Nasca art style was considered to be the result of and was used as evidence for the existence of this state. In particular, the supposedly sudden cooccurrence of allegedly fortified sites and Nasca 3 pottery in the Acari valley was noted. The abandonment of these fortified sites in Acari, contemporary with the decline of Cahuachi at the end of Early Intermediate Period epoch 3, was considered "suggestive" of "a little empire on the coast which was destroyed after a generation or two" (Rowe 1963: 12). Early Nasca society was also imputed to be a state by virtue of the supposedly urban character of Cahuachi (Rowe 1963: 11). On the basis of their fieldwork in the lower Pisco and upper Ica valleys, Peters (1 986) and Massey (1 986) have argued that Nasca 3 society was organized as a conquest state. Peters's data remain in preliminary form. I have not examined her pottery and sites and am reluctant to use her paper for resolution of the "chiefdom-state debate ." However, brief field reconnaissance in the upper Ica valley in 1988, conducted with Miguel Pazos and Susana Arce, disputes Massey's contention of a Nasca 3 administrative center at Cerro Tortolita (see Massey 1986: fig. 4.13). We have found no such Nasca 3 site but only the small, planned, special-purpose architectural complex mapped by Massey (1986: fig. 4.14); that complex is in surface association with mostly Nasca 4 and 5 pottery. The multitiered Nasca 3 site hierarchy for the upper Ica valley falls apart without the Cerro Tortolita administrative center since Massey's other Nasca 3 sites are differentiated by size only. In the Acari valley there is a major Nasca 3 occupation at the sites of Tambo Viejo, Chocavento, Huarato, and Amato (Rowe 1963; Menzel and...

Share