Beyond horizons and stages: A periodization proposal for peruvian archaeology

Abstract

The sequential ordering of the social phenomena that occurred throughout Peruvian history is one of the main tasks of historians and archaeologists. In the case of Andean prehistory (ca. 12 000 BC-AD 1532), scholars interested in the past and archaeologists have proposed a series of schemes to organize an infinite number of social phenomena, despite even lacking written sources, as is the case of Peruvian pre-Colonial archaeology. Although important schemes have been proposed, many of them have been overcome by new data from archaeological research or, simply because of their underlying theoretical proposal, they no longer effectively account for the social phenomena they hoped to organize. This essay proposes a new periodization for Peruvian prehistory that spans from the early settlement of the Central Andes to the fall of the Inca Empire. The immediate objective is to organize the phenomena of the past in a more coherent way regarding to the most recent archaeological data and academic discussions that allows us to continue with the construction of Peruvian prehistory.