The Inkas and the Sacred Landscape of El Shincal de Quimivil, Nortwestern Argentina

MORALEJO, REINALDO ANDRES; AVENTIN MORETTI, MILAGROS

Orlando

Congreso; 81st Annual Meeting Society for American Archaeology; 2016

Society for American Archaeology

Throughout history, societies have had a particular worldview and a sense of whats sacred, so that in each time and space they have expressed in different ways their own awareness of an origin and a destiny. The objective of this paper is to describe and to analyze the sacred Inka landscape in one of the southernmost New Cuzco capital of the Kollasuyu: The Shincal of Quimivil, located in the province of Catamarca, Northwestern Argentina. The mythical stories of the Inkas tell that there was a sacred coexistence and a balance between nature and mankind, giving both meaning and organization to time and space, providing foundations and coherence to society. In The Shincal of Quimivil one can see several indicators of this principle of landscape organization. The approach we used consists of the micromorphological analysis of each site component. This analysis not only allows us to grasp each element in detail, but also to understand it as part of an integrated system that had as it main purpose to symbolically replicate the Cusco capital as a model of hegemonic and territorial appropriation.