ABSTRACT:     The Eastern Andes—a “biodiversity hotspot” of high-altitude tropical rainforest sandwiched between the Andes Mountains and the Amazon Basin—has been portrayed as a place of social and political disorder as far back as the Inka Conquest of this region prior to European colonization.  These ideologically biased frameworks led archaeologists to largely ignore this region until the late 20th c., and these still continue to structure historical interpretation of these landscapes and their inhabitants.  Emerging research, however, pushes back against imperialist depictions of this region by revealing how indigenous groups (1000-1450CE) flourished in areas long perceived by outsiders as environmentally difficult or ill-suited for human well-being.  These findings problematize long-entrenched assumptions about the relative habitability of landscapes and offer insights for modeling the parameters of sustainable practice in an ecologically complex region.

BIO:     Anna Guengerich received her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Eckerd College (St. Petersburg, FL).  She has directed the community-based Tambillo Archaeological Project in Chachapoyas, Peru, since 2011 and co-edited the volume ¿Qué fue Chachapoyas? Aproximaciones interdisciplinarias en el estudio de los Andes Nororientales (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2017).  She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Demanding Hosts: Monolithic Sculpture and the Making of Tiwanaku, based on a secondary research program in highland Bolivia, and maintains additional research interests in graphic novels and other visual media in archaeology. 

On Campus Location:
Tozzer Anthropology building, Room 203
21 Divinity Avenue
 

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