Pampa Grande and the Mochica Culture - Softcover

Shimada, Izumi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0292723377 ISBN 13: 9780292723375

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 1994

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

Review:

"In Shimada’s elegantly illustrated, well argued and documented book, he undertakes the task of exploring the complex causes for the transition registered between Moche-IV and Moche-V, and for the rise and fall of [the] last great Mochica civic experiment, Pampa Grande. But far more is offered, for Shimada embarked on a brilliant critical re-evaluation of what is known and still enigmatic about the long-lived Mochica cultural tradition in the Peruvian North Coast.... .Using a multidisciplinary approach Shimada weaves a richly patterned tapestry of Mochica prehistory. It is required reading for archaeologists interested in Latin America." Source: Antiquity

"[Pampa Grande and the Mochica Culture] demonstrates what archaeologists can achieve in terms of reading cultural meaning from the material record. . . . Clear, thoughtful, detailed, and balanced, it is one of the finest treatments of a prehistoric culture that I have ever read." Source: Latin American Indian Literatures Journal

About the Author:

Izumi Shimada is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He has authored or edited over 200 publications, including Pampa Grande and the Mochica Culture and Craft Production in Complex Societies, and has received awards and honors from the governments of, and other institutions in, both Japan and Peru.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0292723377
• ISBN 13: 9780292723375
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 341