Pins and powders, pots and pendants

This essay investigates an ancient burial offering in Peru’s north highlands. It focuses on its contents and how its material forms and associated properties facilitated and oriented human engagements and understandings (see Hodder 2012, 48–50; Knappett 2005, chap. 4; Chapman 2000; Gell 1998; Gosden 2005). By reconstructing how they may have worked and signified together for an archaeological culture, the study moves the focus away from a single artifact, artwork, or iconography to the overall material corpus, and to the formal relations between objects and their contexts, in space and through time. The study draws from archaeological investigations at Pashash, a monumental hilltop center of the Recuay culture in Pallasca province, Ancash Department, north central Peru (Grieder 1978; Lau 2011a). The context comprises a rich noble burial, to which at least four discrete caches of offerings were dedicated. The arrangements of their contents reveal distinct approaches to humans and things, based on part-whole relations. The offering practices were recursive and multiscalar (e.g., paired, groups, smaller, sequential, additional). The materials, I argue, helped articulate new social understandings emerging in the ancient Andean world during the first millennium AD—namely, that the offering and its components were cultural expressions of a kin-based collectivity and ancestor-led polity.