Abstract
Ritual was an effective power building strategy in many archaic states and early empires. In this paper we describe the ritual abandonment of a palace residence at the Wari site of Cerro Baúl in southern Peru. This exclusive ritual event brought provincial and local elites together and included a funerary internment, feasting, and the intentional creation of numerous and varied offerings throughout the structure. We document the patterning and contents of these deposits including food animals, non-consumable and exotic animals, lithics, and broken ceramic vessels. We posit that lavish offerings such as the one we document here were sponsored by the state and communicated institutional facts to participants. Elements of these rituals may have been repeated across the Wari Empire and been integral to Wari institutions. As such, the study of ritual depositions and other patterned practices may be one means by which the presence of Wari elites or control by the Wari polity may be assessed through material remains. The features of ritual deposits may shed light on the strategies elites used to exert power over their subjects. This methodology may have broad application in the study of expansive polities in the Andes and elsewhere.
Highlights
The Wari Empire of Peru was the largest polity to develop in the Americas before the Inka
We refer to the patio group as the palace residence, and this paper describes the remains of a ritual staged in this component of the palace, which were designated during excavations as Unit 9, Rooms A, B, C, D, E, F, and G
On the summit of Cerro Baúl the Wari Empire built an administrative center that oversaw a provincial enclave of migrants and local populations in the Osmore drainage of far southern
Summary
The provincial context of this ritual deposit along with the regionally available resources, local schemes of value, and the inclusion of local participants may have influenced the feast menu and the items selected as offerings; because the ritual we report here does not have local antecedents, it presumably was introduced by Wari elites and was part of an imperial strategy integral to Wari governance (Nash and Williams, 2009).1 For this reason, describing this celebration and closure event in material and spatial detail is important to Wari studies, Central Andean pre-Columbian archaeology, and investigations of expansive empires in general. As such archaeologists can study patterned ritual depositions to define elements of the political economy underpinning political expansion and discover the elite strategies employed for incorporating subject groups
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