research: GF Lau: recuay

Above: Ceramic vessel of decapitator figure with sacrificial knife and severed head. (Photo © D. Giannoni)

The Recuay

Recuay culture, based in north-central Peru, provides a significant test case for assessing Andean social complexity through the archaeological record. Recuay has long been recognized as part of the unprecedented "Classic Period" florescence of distinctive art styles, urbanism, technologies, and socio-political heterogeneity during the 1st millennium A.D. The Moche and Nasca styles, coeval with Recuay, are among the best known and most admired of Pre-Columbian America, yet the Recuay culture and its art have largely been ignored due to logistical difficulties of research and political instability in Peru's highlands. Like their contemporaries, Recuay peoples were renowned for their distinctive cultural traditions that emerged during the early centuries A.D. and persisted at least until Wari expansion by A.D. 750. While important studies exist on mortuary practices and the art style, very little is known about Recuay social organization, settlements, or chronology.

Although Recuay peoples maintained strong connections to coastal regions, highland Ancash formed the core of Recuay culture. Like traditional groups today, the Recuay populated regions advantageous for the economies of agriculture, herding, and exchange. Crops from lower elevations, like maize, fruits, and coca, supplemented high altitude staples, like potatoes and grains. Domestic camelids also played critical economic roles for their meat, hair fiber, dung, skins, and utility as transport animals.

In certain zones of highland Ancash, especially in key agricultural and trading locales, archaeologists have identified monumental architecture, corporate labor projects, and marked distinctions in mortuary practices consistent with ranked societies, probably along the lines of large chiefdoms or "curacazgos." In most parts of the Recuay heartland, however, more common social arrangements entailed largely egalitarian communities based around fortified hilltop settlements that served to organize local households, production, defense and ceremonial activities.

Recuay's development represents a remarkable example of adaptation to challenging highland environments that contrasts with earlier societies (i.e., Chavín). Recuay research promises to offer insights into the emergence of political hierarchy in small-scale, "transegalitarian" societies. Public art, exchange, technological innovations, warfare, and religion can all be cited in reference to the processes leading to marked Recuay socio-political change during the Early Intermediate Period. Finally, the cases of Recuay interaction with neighboring groups and later with Wari people can be understood using different anthropological models for the emergence and decline of complex social systems.

reconstruction of Recuay presentation scene

Above: Artist's reconstruction of Recuay chiefly duties. This representation draws liberally from well-known Moche imagery depicting the presentation and subsequent sacrifice of prisoners. Museo Arqueologico de Ancash, Huaraz.