Pampa Grande and the Mochica Culture - Softcover

Shimada, Izumi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0292723377 ISBN 13: 9780292723375

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2009

Synopsis

Pampa Grande, the largest and most powerful city of the Mochica (Moche) culture on the north coast of Peru, was built, inhabited, and abandoned during the period A.D. 550-700. It is extremely important archaeologically as one of the few pre-Hispanic cities in South America for which there are enough reliable data to reconstruct a model of pre-Hispanic urbanism.

This book presents a "biography" of Pampa Grande that offers a reconstruction not only of the site itself but also of the sociocultural and economic environment in which it was built and abandoned. Izumi Shimada argues that Pampa Grande was established rapidly and without outside influence at a strategic position at the neck of the Lambayeque Valley that gave it control over intervalley canals and their agricultural potential and allowed it to gain political dominance over local populations. Study of the site itself leads him to posit a large resident population made up of transplanted Mochica and local non-Mochica groups with a social hierarchy of at least three tiers.

About this title

About the Author:

Izumi Shimada is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

Review:

"There is no work whatever at this time that presents the urban configuration and composition of a Moche city, so [Shimada's] considerable data on this topic will be very valuable for scholars of urbanism of the Moche, of the North Coastal region and, for comparative purposes, of Andean culture in general." (Garth Bawden, director, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, and professor of anthropology, University of New Mexico)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0292723377
• ISBN 13: 9780292723375
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 341