Anthropology’s Annual Visiting Lecture Series - Legacies of War

Conflict and Community in a Mountain Landscape: An Archaeology of Peruvian Hillforts

Speaker: Dr Elizabeth Arkush, University of Pittsburgh

Violent conflict in the late pre-Columbian Peruvian altiplano structured landscapes and communities in fundamental ways and reshaped understandings of gender, group identity, territory, and ancestors. This talk draws on two decades of archaeological fieldwork among the hillfort settlements (pukaras) of Peru's Titicaca Basin to explore the forms of Andean community that crystallized around conflict. I consider pukaras, and the societies they sheltered, within a broader panorama of war-related political dynamics over Andean time and space.