Ancient Andean Houses: Making, Inhabiting, Studying

Abstract

Jerry Moore delivers a superb, holistic study of making, inhabiting, and studying houses in the Andes, primarily the coastal and mountainous areas. Moore's exhaustive literature discussion includes the most influential scholars on the Andes, who are familiar in US academia, but also key local Andean scholars. While the focus is on the Andes, Moore quite aptly compares techniques and practices of house building there with other ancient societies around the world. Moore critically examines a large body of sources, including colonial chronicles and scholarship on archaeology, architecture, ethnography, history, and other topics. All of this is backed by a close study of prominent Andean archaeological studies and the fieldwork that Moore himself carried out for this book.Moore shows how previous archaeological projects' treatments of habitation and domestic architecture in the Andes grew out of the conceptual framework and techniques established in earlier studies. He states that the book's main goal is “to advance archaeological understanding of households and houses in prehistoric societies by applying new empirical, methodological, and theoretical approaches to ancient Andean houses” (p. 1). The book traces the development of Andean domestic architecture and residence patterns. Moore discusses how major archaeological projects in the region, such as the Virú Valley, Chan Chan–Moche Valley, and Teotihuacan Valley Projects, provided the theoretical framing for studies claiming that Andean residential patterns demonstrated social differentiation through the size and building materials of house structures. For instance, Moore highlights the prevalence of the concept from Gordon Willey's Virú Valley Project that human dwellings progress from “small, conjoined rooms” to the “Scattered Small-House Village” and then the “Irregular Agglutinated Village” (pp. 269–70). Similarly, Moore notes how Jeffrey Parsons's Teotihuacan Valley Project followed Felix Keesing's idea that “housing has a close functional relation to the habits of the social aggregation of the group,” so that “an extended family household will require either a large structure, or else a cluster of related structures” (quoted in pp. 272–73).Perhaps the book's most engaging section addresses “inhabiting Andean houses” as a key element for studying the region's archaeology and architecture. Moore discusses and challenges previous demographic and economic assumptions about family size, composition, and wealth. Drawing from scholarly examinations of ancient material culture, chroniclers such as Pedro de Valdivia and Pedro Mariño de Lobera, and contemporary research, Moore explains that in Andean domestic architecture a house's size and material composition cannot alone determine a given community's specific cultural identities, wealth, or inequality. Following other scholars' more nuanced examinations of wealth and social differentiation in ancient societies, Moore argues that those studying Andean architecture must consider—in addition to dwellings' building materials, interior complexity, and decorative elements—land extension, availability of materials, and integration into economic networks and markets.Through a close examination of fieldwork on Peru's north coast, Moore shows that perceptions of social differentiation in this region cannot be based on house size and materials alone and that factors such as long-term development changes, a particular society's consolidation and decline, and regional environmental factors such as the cyclical El Niño events need to be considered. Moore shows that these communities' economies were primarily agrarian, based on the production of maize, squash, and beans, supplemented by camelid pastoralism and small livestock such as guinea pigs and Muscovy ducks. Furthermore, their buildings clearly differed from those in the main ciudadelas and other similar valley societies, despite the availability of basic building materials like adobe bricks, tapia, quincha, and fieldstone. Thus, Moore asserts that “‘inequality’ serves as a loose but useful synonym for a number of dimensions that distinguish members of human societies: access to commodities, the ability to mobilize and command labor, command of ritual knowledge, control of cosmological forces, the exercise of physical forces, and so on” (p. 332). Given this, “a cross-cultural survey of relative inequalities can highlight differences, but does not identify their causes or origins” (p. 333). For this reason, he argues, the material remains of ancient houses must also be examined for how they were inhabited.While the book demonstrates a comprehensive approach to better understanding the building, uses, and study of ancient Andean houses, specific regional differences remain to be studied. The Andean region has been home for many civilizations with diverse social systems and unique modes of settlement, production, and housing. House building in many of these societies responded to different challenges that are discussed in the book but are not fully examined, such as the need for protection from heat, humidity, and wild animals in rain-forest communities, and the need for protection from dry weather, permanent cold, and wind in highland communities. Ancient Andean Houses is an engaging and deeply instructional text that transported me from the Andean highlands to the coast and the rain forest and back, as well as from ancient times to the present.