4 Community Labor and Laboring Communities within the Tiwanaku State (C.E. 500–1100)

Abstract

Understanding how work was managed and who participated in state-level societies can help elucidate daily activities as well as community development within an emerging complex society. Tiwanaku, with multiethnic neighborhoods in the Titicaca Basin, Bolivia and colonies near present-day Moquegua, Peru, provides a comparison of labor between groups. Specific skeletal evidence of activity (i.e., musculoskeletal stress markers and osteoarthritis) was evaluated to infer how habitual activity varied within this state. Labor rates show that laborers did not work at the behest of elites and results suggest instead, that people worked as reciprocal laborers in a guild-like system.