Early village society in the formative period in the Southern Lake Titicaca Basin

Abstract

The southern Lake Titicaca Basin (Figure 8.1) is best known as the heartland of the Tiwanaku state (Kolata 1993; Stanish 2003). Research in the area has until quite recently been predominantly oriented toward issues of state formation, expansion, and collapse. The Formative Period-a two thousand year interval of sedentary agricultural village life-has been considered mainly as an antecedent to Tiwanaku emergence. It is only recently that archaeologists have followed the lead of the pioneering projects of the early and middle 20th century (Bennett 1936; Browman 1978, 1986; Kidder 1956; Portugal Ortíz 1992), and begun to devote considerable resources to the investigation of the culture history and the social and economic dynamics of the Formative Period itself (Bandy 2001, 2004; Hastorf 2003; Hastorf ed. 1999; Hastorf et al. 2001; Janusek 2001, 2003; Lémuz 2001; Lémuz and Paz 2001). These efforts have recently begun to bear fruit (see Janusek 2004 for a recent review), with the result that it is now a very exciting time to be studying the Titicaca Basin Formative. © 2006 Springer.