Rituals of the Past explores the various approaches archaeologists use to identify ritual in the material record and discusses the influence ritual had on the formation, reproduction, and transformation of community life in past Andean societies. A diverse group of established and rising scholars from across the globe investigates how ritual influenced, permeated, and altered political authority, economic production, shamanic practice, landscape cognition, and religion in the Andes over a period of three thousand years.

Contributors deal with theoretical and methodological concerns including non-human and human agency; the development and maintenance of political and religious authority, ideology, cosmologies, and social memory; and relationships with ritual action. The authors use a diverse array of archaeological, ethnographic, and linguistic data and historical documents to demonstrate the role ritual played in prehispanic, colonial, and post-colonial Andean societies throughout the regions of Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. By providing a diachronic and widely regional perspective, Rituals of the Past shows how ritual is vital to understanding many aspects of the formation, reproduction, and change of past lifeways in Andean societies.

Contributors: Sarah Abraham, Carlos Angiorama, Florencia Avila, Camila Capriata Estrada, David Chicoine, Daniel Contreras, Matthew Edwards, Francesca Fernandini, Matthew Helmer, Hugo Ikehara, Enrique Lopez-Hurtado, Jerry Moore, Axel Nielsen, Yoshio Onuki, John Rick, Mario Ruales, Koichiro Shibata, Hendrik Van Gijseghem, Rafael Vega-Centeno, Verity Whalen

Silvana A. Rosenfeld is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of South Dakota. Her research interests include ancient ritual, animal domestication, ancient foodways, and bone technology, and her work has been published in Quaternary International, Anthropological and Archaeological Sciences, Nawpa Pacha, and Latin American Antiquity. She has conducted most of her fieldwork in Ayacucho, Cuzco, and Chavín de Huántar (Peru), and her research has been funded by grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation. This is her first book.

Stefanie L. Bautista is completing her dissertation for the anthropology department at Stanford University. Her research interests include household archaeology, ceramic technology, and geographical information systems. While her research focuses mainly on the Paracas and Nasca cultures of the Rio Grande de Nasca Region, she also maintains active research interests on the presence of the Wari culture in Arequipa. This is her first book.