Pucará

Pucará, a central Andean archaeological culture and style, named after a site in the department of Puno, Peru. Pucará sites are concentrated in the northern Lake Titicaca Basin of southern Peru, but Pucará contact or influence extends as far north as Cuzco, to the west in the coastal Moquegua Valley, and to the southwest in the area of Tiwanaku, Bolivia. Radiocarbon dates center between 100 bce and 100 ce, and stylistically Pucará appears contemporary with early Nasca on the coast.

Pucará, the largest site and the religious center of a powerful polity, covering about 371 acres, is situated at 12,800 feet and overlooks the Pucará River, which flows into Lake Titicaca some fifty miles to the southeast. At the base of a huge cliff are monumental stone-faced terraces on which at least six temples were built. On the plain below are mounds and a large, low, public platform, with adjoining rooms, where about 100 human skull fragments were concentrated.

The U-shaped temples, oriented east facing the river, consist of adjoining rooms of finely-cut stone blocks around a square, slab-lined sunken court. The rooms have internal compartments, likely used for storage, and the court has a grave chamber in the center of each wall. While some have argued Pucará was a city, habitation areas within the site remain unclear, and much of the refuse may be explained as the result of periodic pilgrimage.

Herding of llama and alpaca, hunting of deer and birds, fishing, and use of dogs and guinea pigs were complemented by agriculture, probably involving local grains and tubers such as quinoa and potato, respectively. Raised fields intensified production on lake margins, while qocha (artificial depressions containing raised fields) were perhaps used inland.

The Pucará pottery style represents a standardized, explicit expression of a powerful religion manipulated by an elite at a major production center, but it is not yet known whether the Pucará polity was a state. Pucará continues many aspects of the Yaya Mama Religious Tradition (c. 600–100 bce), including details of the temple- storage architectural complexes (including the use of the double jamb with double stepfret that persisted into Tiwanku and Inca times), sculpture, trumpets, and aspects of iconography (felines, frogs and toads, serpents, checkered crosses, rings, heads with rayed appendages, divided eyes, and "tear" bands). The earlier complex at Chiripá, or others like it, served as a direct model for those at Pucará; little is known of the earlier temple at Pucará. Pucará was suddenly abandoned and power in the basin shifted to Tiwanaku (400–1000 ce). Although the Tiwanaku corporate style, and that of the Huari state in Peru (600–800 ce) influenced by Tiwanaku, draws heavily and specifically on the crystallized Pucará religious iconography, it is still unclear how that process occurred, especially since a substantial Pucará occupation in the southern basin has yet to be documented.

See alsoAgriculture .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Elías Mujica, "Altiplano-Coast Relationships in the South-Central Andes: From Indirect to Direct Complementarity," in Andean Ecology and Civilization: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Andean Ecological Complementarity, edited by Shozo Masuda, Izumi Shimada, and Craig Morris, pp. 103-140.

Karen L. Mohr Chávez, "The Significance of Chiripa in Lake Titicaca Basin Developments," in Expedition 30, no. 3 (1988): 17-26.

Clark L. Erickson, "Raised Field Agriculture in the Lake Titicaca Basin: Putting Ancient Agriculture Back to Work," in Expedition 30, no. 3 (1988): 8-16.

Sergio J. Chávez, "The Conventionalized Rules in Pucará Pottery Technology and Iconography: The Nature of Pucará Pottery in the Northern Lake Titicaca Basin" (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1992).

Additional Bibliography

Isbell, William H., and and Helaine Silverman, eds. Andean Archaeology. 2 v. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2002–

Stanish, Charles. Ancient Titicaca: The Evolution of Complex Society in Southern Peru and Northern Bolivia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Young-Sánchez, Margaret, ed. Tiwanaku: Ancestors of the Inca. Denver: Denver Art Museum; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

                               Karen L. Mohr ChÁvez