* Written by one of the leading experts in Andean archaeology, including more of his insights on the latest developments * Increased content on issues with contemporary relevance such as the environment and climate change and, repatriation and social justice * Expanded final section that extends the chronological range of the book to include the Andean world of the Conquest and Colonial Periods as well as the Republican and contemporary Andean worlds and their prehispanic heritage.

* Written by one of the leading experts in Andean archaeology, including more of his insights on the latest developments * Increased content on issues with contemporary relevance such as the environment and climate change and, repatriation and social justice * Expanded final section that extends the chronological range of the book to include the Andean world of the Conquest and Colonial Periods as well as the Republican and contemporary Andean worlds and their prehispanic heritage.

Gardens contain time, culture, and nature. They are powerful symbolic spaces onto which a society can project its ideals, either to conjure or contrive cultural change, rooting them in the flow of natural processes. Five authors explore the variety of relationships between garden making and cultural change in Argentina, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States. They show how gardens express popular cultural invention and attempts at political manipulation, as well as provide places of cultural resistance by subjugated people. Issues of identity and ideology; political coercion and resistance apply equally throughout the continent, inviting a renewed attention to gardens as places where cultural identities are forged and contested.

Peru s ancient Moche culture is represented in a magnificent collection of artifacts at Harvard s Peabody Museum. In this richly illustrated volume, Jeffrey Quilter presents a fascinating introduction to this intriguing culture and explores current thinking about Moche politics, history, society, and religion.

Quilter utilizes the Peabody s collection as a means to investigate how the Moche used various media, particularly ceramics, to convey messages about their lives and beliefs. His presentation provides a critical examination and rethinking of many of the commonly held interpretations of Moche artifacts and their imagery, raising important issues of art production and its role in ancient and modern societies.

The most up-to-date monograph available on the Moche and the first extensive discussion of the Peabody Museum s collection of Moche ceramics this volume provides an introduction for the general reader and contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions. Quilter s fresh reading of Moche visual imagery raises new questions about the art and culture of ancient Peru.

El Nino is an extreme climate perturbation that periodically changes weather throughout the globe, often with dire consequences. First recognized in Peru, El Nino events are best known and documented there. This book summarizes research on the nature of El Nino events in the Americas and details specific historic and prehistoric patterns in Peru and elsewhere. By also looking at other catastrophic natural events in the ancient New World, the book illustrates how scientific archaeology can serve pure research as well as provide information for contemporary issues.

"Life and Death at Paloma, when published in 1989, was the first in-depth treatment of burials from a preagricultural South American village. It remains a valuable resource used by students and scholars of Andean archaeology. Jeffrey Quilter analyzes the life of Paloma's people during the transition from a hunting-gathering-fishing way of life to a more sedentary horticultural society and offers a study of preceramic Peruvian life through his analysis of this site's graves and their contents.

This volume brings together essays on the nature of political organization of the Moche, a complex pre-Inca society that existed on the north coast of Peru from c. 100 to 800 CE. Since the discovery of the royal tombs of Sipan in 1987, the Moche have become one of the best-known pre-Hispanic cultures of the Americas and the focus of a number of archaeological projects. But the nature of Moche political organization is still debated. Some scholars view the Moche as a monolithic state, others see a clear distinction between a northern and southern Moche polity, and yet others argue that the most accurate model is one in which each valley contained an independent polity. In a presentation of new data and new perspectives, the authors debate these competing theories. Based on a set of papers presented by sixteen international scholars at the Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Studies symposium held in Lima, Peru, in 2004, this volume marks an important point in the development of Moche archaeology and will be a landmark work in Pre-Columbian studies.

The Inka Empire stretched over much of the length and breadth of the South American Andes, encompassed elaborately planned cities linked by a complex network of roads and messengers, and created astonishing works of architecture and artistry and a compelling mythology--all without the aid of a graphic writing system. Instead, the Inkas' records consisted of devices made of knotted and dyed strings--called khipu--on which they recorded information pertaining to the organization and history of their empire. Despite more than a century of research on these remarkable devices, the khipu remain largely undeciphered.

In this benchmark book, twelve international scholars tackle the most vexed question in khipu studies: how did the Inkas record and transmit narrative records by means of knotted strings? The authors approach the problem from a variety of angles. Several essays mine Spanish colonial sources for details about the kinds of narrative encoded in the khipu. Others look at the uses to which khipu were put before and after the Conquest, as well as their current use in some contemporary Andean communities. Still others analyze the formal characteristics of khipu and seek to explain how they encode various kinds of numerical and narrative data.

IN this lively tale of archaeological adventure in the tropical forest, Jeffrey Quilter tells the story of his excavation of Rivas, a great ceremonial center at the foot of the Talamanca Mountain range, which flourished between A.D. 900 and 1300, and its fabled gold-filled cemetery, the Panteon de La Reina. Beginning with the 1992 field season and ending with the last excavations in 1998, Quilter discusses Rivas's builders and users, theories on chiefdom societies, and the daily interactions and surprises of modern archaeological fieldwork. Writing in the first person with a balance between informal language and academic theory, Quilter concludes that Rivas was a ceremonial center for mortuary rituals to bury chiefly elite on the Panteon. Through the use of his narrative technique, he provides the reader with accounts of discoveries as they occurred in fieldwork and the development of interpretations to explain the ancient refuse and cobble architecture his team uncovered. As his story progresses amid the enchantment of the Costa Rican landscape, research plans are adjusted and sometimes completely overturned as new discoveries, often serendipitous ones, are made. Such changing circumstances lead to new insights into the rise and fall of the people who built the cobble circles and raised the standing stones at Rivas a thousand years ago. The only book in English that focuses on a single archaeological site in Costa Rica, which continues to develop as a destination for archaeological tourism, "Cobble Circles and Standing Stones will appeal to laypeople and professionals alike.