To Convince, Indoctrinate, and Rule : Religion and the Exercise of Power in Chavín de Huántar over an Intermediate Area in the Middle and Late Andean Formative

To Convince, Indoctrinate, and Rule 57 1465 ceramic sherds in all mixed with "animal bones, charcoal and sections of small and large stones" (Bennett 1944: 80).Judging from the materials he recovered, such as charcoal, animal bones, and fragments of large stones, it is possible that these materials were produced by the discharge of food consumption activities either at the household or supra household levels.Regrettably, there were no major indicators of the nature of the contexts excavated or the locations of these elements within these layers. Julio C. Tello's ExcavationsIn 1940, Julio C. Tello excavated one unit sized 4 x 3 m (Ch-1), four meters south of where Bennett excavated unit Ch-15.Tello had two hypotheses on the nature of the Wacheqsa sector.He thought, as Bennett did, that it served as the location of the domestic settlement related to the Ceremonial Center as the Wacheqsa sector "must correspond to the places where hamlets and houses were.The kind of trash found there can be followed around the contours of the ruins and domestic wares can be observed" (Tello 1940: 25).His second hypothesis was, "These extensive cultivated lands have a thick layer of agricultural dirt and abundant domestic ceramic sherds on the surface, and for those reasons these lands could be considered as trash areas.This brownish or chocolate land only tends to appear at the edge of main buildings" (Tello 1940: 25).These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, "as this brownish matrix is only present in the edges of the main buildings, it probably was an ancient trash area and consequently, the area where the domestic settlement was located" (Tello 1960: 317).Marino Gonzales supervised Ch-1, and identified four archaeological strata.The first layer is agricultural land in which post-Chavn material (Recuay) was recovered.The second layer produced Chavn ceramics, especially those that we now know as janabarroid (Mesa Montenegro 2017, 2022;Rick 2014;Rick et al. 2010).In this layer, Tello also found faunal remains of camelid and deer mixed with fragments of stone clubs and mortars.He wrote that the ceramics were highly polished with fine shallow engravings on the surface that belonged to the "classic Chavn period" (Tello 1960: 317).According to Tello, this layer could be "considered as the remains of a large midden" (Tello 1940: 27).The third layer contained Chavn ceramics, but in this case, I note the presence of a mixture of decoration and forms that can be urrabarroid and janabarroid (Tello 1960).These materials were found in a green matrix that, according to Tello, seemed to be the product of an alluvial flood that destroyed a domestic settlement located on the upper part of the civic ceremonial center (Tello 1960).Below the third layer, there was nothing but sterile soil.During my research, I excavated near the area Bennett and Tello excavated, finding for example in a 2 x 2 m unit, a total of 24 stratigraphic layers in average depth of 3.50 m, thus the stratigraphic complexity in the Wacheqsa sector is greater than the one Tello and Bennett recorded. Rosa Fung's ExcavationsAfter Tello's intervention, the entire site of Chavn de Huntar was covered by the 1945 landslide, and the Wacheqsa sector was entirely eroded and filled by mud to its current state.Research in this sector was conducted again in 1973, 1974, and 1975, by