Funerary Practices and Models in the Ancient Andes

This edited volume focuses on the funerary archaeology of the Pan-Andean area in the pre-Hispanic period. The contributors examine the treatment of the dead and provide an understanding of how these ancient groups coped with mortality, as well as the ways in which they strove to overcome the effects of death. The contributors also present previously unpublished discoveries and employ a range of academic and analytical approaches that have rarely – if ever – been utilised in South America before. The book covers the Formative Period to the end of the Inca Empire, and the chapters together comprise a state-of-the-art summary of all the best research on Andean funerary archaeology currently being carried out around the globe.

Peter Eeckhout is Professor of Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology and Vice-Director of the Department of History, Arts, and Archaeology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His research interests include complex societies of the Americas, monumental architecture and funerary archaeology. He has been leading excavations in Peru since 1993 and is the founder and director of the Ychsma Project at the site of Pachacamac, near Lima. He is author, editor, or coeditor of several books related to Pachacamac, Peruvian archaeology and wars and conflicts in the ancient Americas, and of more than seventy book chapters and scholarly papers in international journals.

Lawrence Owens lectures in bioarchaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. He specialises in the interpretation of socially oriented themes - notably diet, pathology and trauma - in ancient human skeletons. He has worked on human remains from Peru, the UK, Egypt, South Africa, the United States, Bolivia, Qatar, Spain and the Canary Islands, and he has a particular interest in the relationship between demographics, pathology and aberrant burial traditions in Andean populations. He has worked as head bioarchaeologist on the Ychsma Project at Pachacamac since 2004.