The materiality of ancestors: chullpas and social memory in the late prehispanic history of the South Andes

AXEL E. NIELSEN

Memory Work: Archaeologies of Material Practices

School of Advanced Research Press

Lugar: Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA; Año: 2008; p. 207 - 232

This paper discusses the role played by ancestor veneration in the political transformations experienced by South Andean peoples during the early second millenium AD. It argues that the construction of stone towers or chullpas throughout the region was central to the invention of a collective past in which the new social order was immanent. The visibility, endurance, ubiquity, and multifunctionality of these “ancestral embodiments” –used as burials, silos, altars– allowed people to engage in a direct interaction with ancestors throughout their daily lives, turning history and the contingent power structures that emerged from it, into a present, necessary fact.