Yutopian: Archaeology, Ambiguity, and the Production of Knowledge in Northwest Argentina (The William and Bettye Nowlin Series in Art, History, and Culture of the Western Hemisphere)

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Description

Around 400 BCE, inhabitants of the Southern Andes took up a sedentary way of life that included the practice of agriculture. Settlements were normally solitary or clustered structures with walled agricultural fields and animal corrals, and the first small villages gave the impression in some regions. Surprisingly, people were also producing and circulating exotic goods: polychrome ceramics, copper and gold ornaments, bronze bracelets and bells. To investigate the apparent contradiction between a loss of social complexity and the broad circulation of elaborated goods, archaeologist Joan Gero co-directed a binational project to excavate the website of Yutopian, an unusually well-preserved Early Formative village within the mountains of Northwest Argentina.

In Yutopian, Gero describes how archaeologists from the US and Argentina worked with local residents to uncover the lifeways of the earliest sedentary people of the region. Gero foregounds many experiential aspects of archaeological fieldwork which can be frequently omitted within the archaeological literature: the tedious labor and constraints of time and staff, the emotional landscape, the intimate ethnographic settings and Andean people, the socio-politics, the difficult decisions and, especially, the role that ambiguity plays in determining archaeological meanings. Gero’s unique approach offers a new model for the website report as she masterfully demonstrates how the decisions made in conducting any scientific undertaking play a fundamental role in shaping the knowledge produced in that project.

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