Juan Carlos Chavez Quispe

My project aims to reconstruct pre-Columbian networks in Central Bolivia by studying cultural and osteological materials from four Mojocoya mortuary caves dating to the Middle Horizon (AD 600-1100). Mojocoya was a multi-ethnic small-scale society in which communities used networks to interconnect with peer societies within and outside the Eastern Slopes of the Bolivian Andes. These networks changed during the Middle Horizon due to the influence of a state-level society (Tiwanaku) on regional dynamics. I will study such changes using a culturally respectful methodology in which indigenous views of the dead as Ancestors guide the way to collect data and study all materials currently placed in mortuary caves. My methodology includes thorough documentation of four mortuary caves and data collection of individual attributes to discuss cultural markers of identity (artifactual analysis and cranial modification), biological relatedness (cranial and dental non-metric traits), and paleomobility (heavy isotope analyses). The results will provide new evidence to reconstruct Mojocoya networks while discussing identity, kinship, and migration in an understudied region. This is important because my study of networks in the pre-Columbian Andes will provide a case study of non-state societies working as strategic network-building organizations in South American and world prehistory.