13
Rituals of the Past

Final Comments

Jerry D. Moore

A rich ethnohistorical record documents the importance of ritual in traditional Andean societies, documentation largely created during efforts to extirpate idolatry. Among the more sympathetic accounts is the famous work Nueva Cronica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1993 [1615]), who summarized the calendar of Inka religious practices:

And so it went throughout the Inkan year. In February the Inka king and all his realm sacrificed great quantities of gold and silver and camelids to the huacas for the Sun, the Moon, the stars, and the highest mountain peaks during a season of scarcity and hunger. March was a time of plenty and the month to sacrifice black llamas in ceremonies led by priests and by the layaconas “wizards who speak with demons,” who avoided salt, sex, and fruit during this month (ibid.:180). Multicolored llamas (carneros pintados) were sacrificed in April, a month of fiestas and celebrations marked by songs sung to the llamas and to rivers (ibid.). May was a month of smaller fiestas, as this was the time of harvest; camelids of every color were offered and agrarian oddities—such as a two-eared maize cob or a double-lobed potato—were venerated (ibid.:183).

June was the winter solstice and the fiesta of Inti Raymi, when the Sun received offerings of gold, silver, and Spondylus shells (mullu), and children were sacrificed at shrines throughout Tawantinsuyu (ibid.). July was devoted to preparing fields for planting, accompanied by sacrifices to the Sun and river systems so they would not damage future crops, offerings that included 100 blood-red llamas and 1,000 white guinea pigs who were burned in the public plaza in Cusco (ibid.:186). Farm fields were tilled and planted in August, and throughout the kingdom local huacas were offered guinea pigs, mullu, maize gruel, chicha, and children (ibid.). September was devoted to the fiesta of the Moon, the Wife of the Sun and the Queen of all the planets and stars; this was also when the Inka king deployed his armies to drive out pestilence from the land, which they did by shouting for the disease to leave and hurling burning embers from their slings (ibid.:186–88). October was devoted to rites focused on rainfall in ceremonies involving weeping: the elderly and infirm cried for rain, dogs were beaten until they howled, and a herd of black llamas was tethered in the plaza and intentionally starved until the animals bleated in hunger, adding their cries to the pleadings for rain (ibid.:189). Feasts for dead ancestors were held in November; mummies of ancestors were visited in their tombs, given food and chicha, sung to, and danced with. This was also the month when the Inka king visited the provinces—reviewing troops, giving out women to be married, and reviewing the stockpiles in state storehouses. In December was the Capac Inti Raymi, “the great and solemn festival of the Sun . . . Lord of the Heavens and all the Planets,” who was honored with sacrifices of great quantities of gold, silver, fine vessels, mullu, camelids, and 500 boys and girls (ibid.:192).

In light of this abundant evidence for the importance of ritual practice in Andean societies, it is surprising that archaeologists working in the Andes have been rather late in making ritual a central focus of archaeological inquiry. As Rosenfeld and Bautista note in their introduction to this volume, “Though ritual has long been important to [sociocultural] anthropologists . . . archaeologists have only more recently recognized the importance of studying ritual and its role in past societies.” Tamara Bray (2015:3) has made a similar point, writing:

Further, archaeology provides the possibility—incompletely realized at this juncture—of understanding how such dictates and actions emerged and changed over time. And these are the issues explored throughout the chapters of this book.

As is made abundantly clear by the studies in this volume, ritual in the prehispanic Andes occurred at multiple scales of social life and was directed to varied purposes and intents. (It is worth realizing that Guaman Poma’s ritual calendar only listed the major, formal, and public rites.) Throughout the Andes, ritual engaged with sacred things and places called wak’as, including origin places affiliated with ethnic and kin groups known as pacarisca wak’as. In his circa 1568 Instrución para descubrir todas las guacas del Pirû y sus camayos y haziendas (in Duviols 1967:20), the ecclesiastic Cristobal de Albornoz wrote that “the principal class of wak’as they had before [been] subjugated by the Inkas are called pacariscas, which is to say ‘Creator of their Natures.’ Depending on the province, these have different forms and names: some are stones, others springs and rivers, others caves, others animals and birds and trees and plants, and despite these differences they insist that they are the offspring and descendents from such things.” Instructing his fellow extirpators, Albornoz orders: “You must understand that not a single kin group (parcialidad)—whether small or large—of these natives lacks a wak’a pacarisca” (ibid.). Albornoz proceeds with a list of known wak’a pacarisca from north of Quito to south of Cusco; 169 mountains, springs, lakes, stones, islands, and other features on the landscape are listed. Even this was not an exhaustive list; Albornoz cautions, “One must understand that these said huacas are the major ones in this kingdom, which the Inkas rebuilt, adored, and provided [with] riches and service. And that in each province there are many more” (ibid.:35).

In 1621 the Jesuit Pablo Jose de Arriaga (1968) published a chapter in The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru titled “What the Indians Worship Today and of What Their Idolatry Consists.” From the Spanish cleric’s point of view, it was a daunting list. “In many places, especially in the sierra,” he begins, “they worship the sun”; then he notes other astral and atmospheric phenomena: the moon, the Pleiades, and lightning (ibid.:22–23). The sea, mamacocha, and the earth, mamapacha, were worshipped, as were streams and springs “especially when water is scarce, begging them not to dry up” (ibid.:23). When crossing a river, the Indians would cup riverwater in their hands and “talk to the river, asking it to let them cross over without being swept away” (ibid.). The hills and mountains—and even large stones—were named and revered and were the subjects of “numerous fables about their changes and metamorphoses” (ibid.:24). The ruins of ancient people were revered as the houses of ancient giants, the huaris. The places of ancestral origins, the pacarinas—which could be caves, hills, streams, or rivers—were worshipped. Arriaga describes the movable objects of veneration: the huacas affiliated with ayllus, the mummies of their ancestors, the incredible variety of icons and amulets known as conopas, the respect for unique ears of corn or double potatoes. Arriaga then details the various offerings made to these subjects of worship and veneration: chicha, llamas, guinea pigs, silver, coca, llama fat, espingo seeds, colorful feathers, Spondylus shells, powders of colorful minerals, wads of cornmeal, and eyelashes, “which they pull out and blow toward the huacas as an offering” (ibid.:46). Later in his treatise, Arriaga (ibid.:115) admits that “some of these huacas are hills and high places that time cannot consume,” and his frustration is still palpable centuries later. Arriaga’s frustration reflected the deep resiliency of Andean ritual, the broad corners of life in which ritual occurred, the embeddedness of religious belief, and the constant enactment of ritual through practice.

This broad engagement of ritual with the Andean world is clearly evident in the study by Axel E. Nielsen, Carlos I. Angiorama, and Florencia Ávila (this volume), who define ritual as “social action that addresses non-human agents that have a significant influence on human fate.” Influenced in part by the “ontological turn” in anthropological theory and related fields (e.g., Descola 2013; Gell 1998; Latour 2005), Nielsen and colleagues explore the rituals Andean peoples deployed to engage with entities they consider sentient beings capable of power, awareness, intentionality, choice, and some form of responsibility. In their fascinating and careful study, Nielsen and colleagues discuss archaeological evidence from the Southern Andes for a specific but incompletely understood ritual gesture in which pits were excavated at key locations: mountain passes but also at camps along llama caravan routes, water springs, and mid-altitude (3,300–4,500 m) mountains peak that were not on caravan routes but near populated areas. Intriguingly, these pits also contained offerings of green and white minerals, stones, and beads, with the green offerings particularly distinctive and widespread. Based on diagnostic ceramics and absolute dates, this ritual practice may be earlier than another well-recorded ritual gesture: piles of stone offerings placed at mountain passes known as apachetas. The authors suggest that the pit and greenstone offerings date from the Late Intermediate Period (ca. AD 1000–1450) and continued to be created in the Late Horizon/Inka period (AD 1450–1550) as well as into the colonial period, while the discovery of apachetas covering Late Intermediate Period pit offerings at Abra de la Cruz, Argentina, may indicate that creating apachetas was a relatively late ritual gesture and in some regions may have only occurred in Colonial and modern times.

In addition to ritual objects and offerings, Andean peoples engaged the cosmos with words, whether creating sophisticated astronomies or imbuing landscape with myths and legends (e.g., Urton 1988, 2011). This semiotic class of ritual engagement is explored by Hendrik Van Gijseghem and Verity H. Whalen (this volume), who argue that “because landscape cognition cradles all human experiences, it should not be divorced from the ritual practice it structures. But achieving an understanding of landscape cognition remains a delicate intellectual exercise that requires the intersection of several lines of evidence.” Their own version of this “delicate exercise” examines the distribution of toponyms in the Ica Valley on the South Coast of Peru, a research project influenced by previous work documenting ritual and other aspects of copper mining in the Upper Ica Valley (Van Gijseghem et al. 2013 ). Van Gijseghem and Whalen suggest a possible—if not absolutely conclusive—relationship between mining zones and negative or ambiguous place names in the Upper Ica Valley, toponyms of “powerful places, ambiguously perceived and potentially dangerous, the abode of mysterious forces, and the focus of extraction of precious materials but also of circumspect rituals.”

The chapters by Nielsen and colleagues and Van Gijseghem and Whalen are the only case studies in this volume to examine archaeological evidence for ritual outside of the prehispanic built environment. Having written extensively about built environments and ritual in the prehispanic Andes (e.g., Moore 1996a, 1996b, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2010a, 2010b), I do not doubt the value of archaeological studies of rituals within or relating to architecture. And yet, our emphasis on ritual within and directed toward architecture is a scholarly bias worth mentioning, especially given the wide range of “natural” places and features that were the objects of and places for Andean ritual practices, as listed by Guaman Poma, Albornoz, Arriaga, and others. I return to this issue at the close of this chapter.

The Andean engagement with the built environment—whether in its creation, use, maintenance and renewal, or destruction—was deeply embedded in ritual practice. Sacred architecture anchored and enhanced ritual practice (Humphrey and Vitebsky 1997). John W. Rick’s long-term study of the Chavín de Huántar, Ancash, Peru, has supported earlier interpretations of the site as a temple complex while deepening our understanding of ritual activities at the site (Rick, this volume). Rick argues that “Chavín’s [architectural] configuration is a strategic attempt to create a physical context that would generate desired psychological states in inductees and participants in the evident cult of Chavín.” The monumental constructions at Chavín de Huántar were undoubtedly places where rituals occurred, practices that involved offerings of fine artifacts and camelids and the intentional manipulation of water. Processions took place in outdoor rectangular and sunken circular plazas. Within the temple mound the dark, mysterious interior galerías were threaded by extensive canals of flowing water, which not only created an audial effect but the canals were also given offerings of “highly decorated pottery, large fragments of camelid bone representing relatively few animals, drug-related paraphernalia, or other categories of ritual material.” Some canals moved water in distinctive ways, including creating junctions of broader, low-energy flows with narrower, high-energy flows—perhaps constructed metaphor for the nearby confluence of the Mosna and Wacheqsa Rivers, a hydraulic convergence locally referred to as tinku or tinkuy. These terms, Rick writes, have “complex meaning in the Andes.” Citing the work of Catherine Allen and H. D. Webb, Rick observes that tinku and tinkuy reference not only “encounters, often violent, between watercourses or between people” but also “issues of complementary and opposing, even opposite forces or dualistic entities, their intermingling and sometimes turbulent coexistence. Structurally, the Chavín canal conjunctions could conceivably represent, on a small, controlled scale, the large tinku at which Chavín was built, in the similarly positioned pattern of unequal size and water energy.” Thus, the canals of Chavín might be seen as constructed, flowing metaphors of confluence and conflict at multiple levels of ritual practice.

In addition to the temple mound, other constructed spaces were settings for the focus of ritual practice at Chavín de Huántar, such as the Mito-style chamber discovered 300 m west discussed by Daniel A. Contreras (this volume). Previously, the Mito Tradition was known from the Central Andean highlands and was thought by the archaeologist Elisabeth Bonnier to date to ca. 2500–2000/1800 BCE, although Richard Burger and Lucy Salazar-Burger argued that this architectural form continued to be influential in the Early Horizon (Bonnier 1997 ; Bonnier and Rozenberg 1988; Burger and Salazar-Burger 1980, 1985). It is now known that Mito-style chambers were still in use in 1000–500 BCE and were more widely distributed, including in coastal sites in the Santa, Casma, and Supe Valleys (e.g., Montoya Vera 2007). Based on Contreras’s excavations and absolute dates, the Mito-style structure was coeval with the monumental core (900–500 BCE) at Chavín de Huántar. This discovery leads Contreras to suggest a pattern of “ritual eclecticism and diversity” and to raise the possibility that there were multiple loci of ritual practice at Chavín. He writes, “The persistence of the Mito Tradition alongside these later developments [was] not, apparently, as a marginalized survivor among a population resisting the changes but rather was incorporated into institutionalized ceremonial practices.” As Contreras notes, only a small portion of the residential area at Chavín has been excavated, and the actual evidence for ritual within the Mito-style chamber is limited to deposits of obsidian flakes and fragments of an anthracite mirror. Contreras’s research broadens and deepens understanding of the diversity of ritual practice during the Formative period in the Andes. However, Contreras slightly misrepresents a hypothesis I suggested in 1996: I did not suggest that small ritual spaces were replaced by the creation of monumental ceremonial architecture at circa 1800–1400 BCE but rather argued that smaller ritual chambers were incorporated into ceremonial centers. I wrote: “After 1800–1400 BC, this changes. Although intimate ritual spaces were maintained, they become auxiliary to larger monumental constructions” (Moore 1996b:226). Rather than refute this then “untested hypothesis” (ibid.), Contreras’s important discovery of a Mito-style chamber coeval with the temple complex at Chavín actually lends it support.

David Chicoine, Hugo Ikehara, Koichiro Shibata, and Matthew Helmer (this volume) apply methods of visual analysis to explore how elites in the Nepeña Valley may have manipulated ritual architecture during the Formative period. Their sophisticated study spans a fascinating and pivotal period in Central Andean prehistory from ca. 1500–1100 cal BC to 450–150 cal BC. The earlier centuries were characterized by centers such as Cerro Blanco (1100–800 cal BC). Chicoine and colleagues write that these centers incorporated “a style of monumental architecture and public visual art that shows symbolic and stylistic similarities with Chavín and Cupisnique-related religious ideologies.” They add, “The Late and Final Formative periods were times of great ritual diversity. Chavín was only part of a very complex series of related developments that included regional and interregional changes that intertwined different styles of architectural design, religious ideology, and public art.” At circa 800–450 cal BC, monuments and friezes at Cerro Blanco and Huaca Partida were extensively remodeled, while monumental buildings at both sites were abandoned circa 450–150 cal BC. Chicoine and colleagues use methods of visual analysis to explore these complex and varied changes, arguing that “leaders, architects, and builders in Nepeña were using ceremonial monuments as tools for multiple purposes, including social control, political integration, and inter-communal competition.”

Along analytically similar lines, Rafael Vega-Centeno Sara-Lafosse (this volume) applies access analysis to understand the potential movements of people through the multi-room construction known as Huaca A at Pampa de las Llamas-Moxeke, drawing on excavations and analyses by Thomas and Shelia Pozorski. Vega-Centeno Sara-Lafosse’s analysis is somewhat puzzling; although he questions the Pozorskis’ interpretation of Huaca A as an “administrative structure,” he provides no evidence for its use as a place or object of ritual practice; nor is it clear how his analysis of access patterns substantively clarifies the functions of Huaca A at Pampa de las Llamas-Moxeke.

Sarah Abraham (this volume) provides an elegant analysis of changing religious architecture at Pukara during the colonial era at the sites of La Quinta and Santa Isabel. La Quinta is the earlier construction, an open chapel that literally incorporated indigenous architectural features (walls and sunken courts), a trapezoidal plan, and a nave that may have been unroofed, an accommodation to native practices of open-air worship—literally, religious architecture that embodied hybridity. By the late sixteenth century, such efforts to incorporate indigenous religious customs had ended: the broad realization that decades of proselytizing efforts had produced a veneer of Christianity over fundamentally unchanged native practice led to the extirpation campaigns mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Paralleling the Toledan reforms and the campaigns against Taki Onkoy (a native revitalization movement that rejected Spanish customs and reinstated native culture and rituals), the architectural hybridity of La Quinta was replaced by the church of Santa Isabel, erected on the main plaza in Colonial Pukara and “built in the classical European cruciform floor plan, [which] featured traditional European architectural canons and showed no Andean influence.” While Abraham has the scholarly advantage of having a rich historical record regarding changes in religious practice in Colonial Peru, her archaeological study exemplifies what we can learn from nuanced studies of architecture associated with religious practice.

Ritual architecture is not only the space in which rites occurred, but it may also be the object and subject of ritual practice. Interestingly, several of the chapters in this volume discuss archaeological evidence for ritual burial or termination of buildings. As mentioned by Yoshio Onuki (this volume), this practice was observed at the site of Kotosh in the Upper Huallaga Valley, Peru, in which successive stages of dismantling, filling, and rebuilding temples led Izumi and Matsuzawa (1967) to dub this process “temple entombment.” This practice has an intriguingly widespread and enduring legacy, apparently from the Archaic period to the Late Horizon, involving rites “relating to the creation, renewal, and termination of ancient built environments” (Gamboa Velásquez 2015 :100). Reviewing the evidence for such rites at Moche sites, Gamboa Valásquez argues that “the available evidence points toward the association of events of dedication, renewal, and termination with political changes and responses to natural phenomena” (ibid.).

In this volume, Onuki reiterates “a hypothesis that involves the ideology of temple renovation as a prime mover of the social development of the Formative period.” To summarize his earlier argument, Onuki (1993:92–93) proposed that episodic renovation of ceremonial centers would have stimulated new sociopolitical arrangements, as larger constructions demanded larger labor pools supported by increasing quantities of food and drink, more elaborate craft and artistic production, and greater interregional exchange. In this volume, Onuki expands on his hypothesis:

This is a plausible hypothesis, but I want to pose two related cautions regarding ritual entombment and its sociopolitical impacts. First, we have ethnographic counter-examples in which recurrent ritual entombments and mound reconstructions do not result in the juggernaut of sociocultural intensification Onuki envisions. For example, Tom Dillehay and colleagues have written extensively about Araucanian mound-building practices as practiced by the Mapuche of Chile, ritual practices beginning between AD 1200 and 1500 and continuing into the twentieth century (Dillehay 1986, 1990, 1995, 2007, 2014). The Mapuche hold a “mound-capping” ceremony (cueltun) in which a local leader’s grave is annually covered with earth, an act of commemoration by kinfolk and allies in which the connections between the living and the dead are maintained and instantiated with layers of earth. Through time, the mound, or kuel, is transformed into a part of the cultural landscape, increasing in height and size as the nearest kinfolk and supporters diminish in number. In some instances, two or more kuel will be constructed on leveled ridges or hilltops, mound complexes known as rehuekuel that become the settings for Mapuche ceremonies—preeminently the nguillatun ceremony, which ensures agricultural fertility, is attended by hundreds of Mapuche, and unifies distinct patrilineages from different communities. Dillehay (2007:42) writes, “The Araucanian’s religious ideology is associated with a cognitive map or imagery of sacred routes and places . . . that connects historically meaningful landscapes and spiritual locations of the real physical world and the spiritual or esoteric worlds, that is, other regions of levels of the cosmos . . . Taken together, kuel and rehuekuel form a social and aesthetic physical arrangement of spaces, pathways, meanings, and objects that keep alive the memories of the individuals and lineages that make Araucanian history.” And yet, these extensive coordinated constructions did not create inter-community competition, changes in food production, or the other innovations Onuki’s hypothesis suggests. Second, it is possible that archaeologists are conflating under the term ritual entombment superficially similar activities motivated by distinct cultural conceptions and ritual intentions. I suggest that we should consider some empirical distinctions as we look at the archaeological evidence.

For example, Camila Capriata Estrada and Enrique López-Hurtado (this volume) discuss evidence for ritual at the Late Intermediate Period/Late Horizon site Panquilma, in the Lurín Valley, Peru. The archaeological evidence points to two classes of rite. First, a series of superimposed, well-made, and clean floors in plazas associated with Pyramids 1 and 3 also contained pits interpreted as offerings; the pits in the center of the plazas contained valuable items such as Spondylus shells and ceramic figurines, whereas pits on the periphery simply contained potsherds. In addition, the elite residential areas associated with the pyramids were subject to intentional burning restricted to the upper platforms of the pyramids; the structures’ roofs were torched, the reed and wood roofing fell and intensely burned the floor, but the fire did not spread to adjacent areas. This seems to have occurred in an unsettled political landscape as the Inkas expanded into the Lurín Valley, incorporated Pachacamac, and conquered other regional centers. Essentially seeing the end of their political autonomy looming, the elites of Panquilma terminated their ancestral seat. Capriata Estrada and López-Hurtado argue that in common with other Andean cases such as Pampa Grande, Túcume, and Cerro Baúl, Panquilma experienced acts that “were probably performed by the local elites who were the original administrators of rituals within these precincts. It seems clear that in addition to the ritual implications of these actions, the common goal was to destroy things either to prevent their future illegitimate use by others or to ‘kill’ them in a metaphoric way, thus undermining and denying legitimacy to imposed authority.”

At Cerro de Oro in the Cañete Valley, Francesca Fernandini and Mario Ruales (this volume) present evidence for termination rituals, burials, and other ritual acts, a “broad spectrum of ritual that spans from small-scale domestic practices to large-scale ceremonies.” Their fundamental argument is sound: “we intend to move beyond the dualistic distinctions that segregate ritual and domestic as two apparently incommensurable realms of social life . . . by exploring ritual as a relational practice. We propose that ritual practices are better understood from a multi-scalar approach that emphasizes the way meanings, social rules, and relations are embedded within the recurrent practices that produce and reproduce their material habitus . . . In this way the nature of ritual can be seen as a process in which repetitive actions socialize people into particular dispositions; in turn, these dispositions establish a recursive relationship with rituals in which social meaning is produced and reformulated through repetition.”

And yet, not everything in an archaeological site is the product of ritual. Fernandini and Ruales describe pits with offerings that include “specially selected material such as partial/complete animals, decorated sherds, musical instruments, and frieze fragments, among other things” in areas that also have evidence for food preparation. They suggest that such structured depositions were “intrinsically associated with the presence of cooking and storage areas, establishing a particular link among unconsumed, consumed, and disposed food.” The authors also discuss evidence for termination rituals incorporating burning events. A specific example comes from Fernandini’s excavations in the SE Area, where a 35–40 cm thick stratum of ash and organic material covered a floor associated with the Cerro de Oro/Middle Horizon occupation (for a detailed discussion, see Fernandini 2015:135–39). Fernandini reports that the floor surface showed evidence of burning and that the ash contained a high density of both ceramics—sherds from serving vessels and cooking pots—and organic materials, which include maize cobs, gourd fragments, reed cordage, cotton fibers, and a textile described as “a large plain cloth made of thick beige cotton S-twist threads, in warp face 1 × 1, with evidence of recurrent repairs” (ibid.:137). The apparently good condition of the organic materials leads one to wonder whether the ash deposit was associated with an in situ burning event or rather was re-deposited midden used as architectural fill before Cerro de Oro was rebuilt.

A different class of ritual practice is described by Matthew J. Edwards (this volume) in his discussion of termination rituals at the Wari installation of Pataraya, in the Nasca Valley circa AD 950, a relatively small enclosure built according to canons of Wari architecture. Activities within Pataraya were spatially segregated, and movement through the compound was channeled via narrow corridors. Edwards proposes a detailed sequence of abandonment rituals. The first offering consists of a cache of nine Wari vessels placed upside down on the floor of a small room—which (in terms of access patterns) was also the most remote space in Pataraya; this was then covered with a deposit of clean river sand and Spondylus shells. Next was a sequence of burned offerings—indicated by small ash features—and single Wari vessels (cups and a jar) smashed next to the burned features; all of these were also covered with clean river sand. At this point a large boulder was rolled into place, blocking access to this residential sector of Pataraya. Another deposit of burned offerings and smashed vessels was followed by another boulder rolled into place, which blocked access to the enclosure. Ritually sealed, the Wari inhabitants broke numerous vessels in front of the now-closed enclosure at Pataraya. The obstructing boulders and layer of river sand may parallel termination rites known from other Wari sites. Although the Wari inhabitants abandoned Pataraya as the Wari Empire waned, that community was not under eminent threat. Rather, the Wari inhabitants engaged in a deliberate sequence of ritual gestures before Pataraya “was carefully abandoned and then quietly forgotten.” The access patterns at Pataraya and the blockage of nodal passages allow for a clear sequence of termination rituals.

As Silvana A. Rosenfeld and Stefanie L. Bautista discuss in the introduction to this volume, identifying ritual practice in the archaeological record poses real challenges (vis. Fogelin 2007; Swenson 2015), but these challenges do not only afflict Andeanists. For example, the identification of specific sets of features and artifacts at British archaeological sites as “structured deposits”—some interpreted as the product of ritual actions—has been discussed by Duncan Garrow (2012). Garrow provides a very useful overview of the development of this idea, pointing to an early (1984) use by Colin Richards and Julian Thomas, followed by the broad use of the concept—especially but not exclusively—by post-processual archaeologists. For example, Richard Bradley (2000:122) wrote of

And yet, as Garrow (2012:114–15) suggests, perhaps we should question alternative hypotheses rather than assume that all such deposits were, in fact, the structured results of ritual practice—which is not to say that none were (see also, Jones 2015). As Garrow (2012:109–10; italics in the original) states, “I do not want to argue here against the suggestion that material culture patterning was not in the past, and cannot be today, explicitly meaningful. It can. However, I do think that in attributing enhanced meaningfulness to all patterning, we have foreclosed other interpretive possibilities.”

Rather than assume that specific archaeological features are the products of ritual (e.g., see Moore 2010b:410 for my interpretation of cairns), perhaps we Andeanists should formulate explicit ways to apply the characteristics of ritual as discussed by Bell (1997:138–69): formality, traditionalism, disciplined invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance. While not all rituals will intersect with all of these domains, we might expect several to be present. Recalling Edwards’s study of ritual closing at Pataraya, we seem to see evidence of formality (e.g., the sequence of burned offerings, the partial blocking of passageways with boulders), traditionalism (analogous deposits known from other Wari sites), disciplined invariance (the regular deposits of burned vessels and a single Wari vessel), and obviously performance—while the evidence for sacral symbolism is less clear. Similarly, such measures could be applied to other archaeological features interpreted as structured ritual deposits in the various studies in this book.

Finally, it is clear that we Andeanists need to consider ritual settings that occurred outside constructed spaces. The range of ritual practices conducted in constructed spaces is extraordinarily important, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate. To repeat, I am not suggesting that ceremonial architecture is unimportant or that rites associated with constructing or using buildings are irrelevant (for a fascinating study of modern construction rituals in Europe, see van den Ende and van Marrewijk 2014). Yet given the broad engagement of Andean rituals, it seems obvious that we need to broaden our inquiries. As we look for models about how such research might proceed, it may be profitable to examine studies by colleagues working on ritual and landscape in the Mayan region, such as Lucero’s work on water and cenotes (Lucero and Kinkella 2015), Brown’s studies of hunting shrines (Brown 2005; Brown and Emery 2008), and studies of caves by Moyes (2014) and others.

The case studies in this collection demonstrate the breadth and detail of Andean peoples’ engagement with their cosmos through ritual practice. The challenge we archaeologists now face is to develop research agendas and analytical methods of similar scope and nuance. A great deal of exciting and demanding research awaits us as we Andeanists broaden and deepen our analytical gaze.