The limited excavation of rural houses in the Mexican highlands has made it difficult to understand the structure of urban-rural economic relationships during the Classic period (A.D. 150 to 650), when many of the large cities at Teotihuacan, Cholula, and Monte Albán first developed. This paper examines economic consumption at Operation 7, a Late Classic rural residence located 11 km outside of the large center of Cholula, Puebla. The results show that Cholula was not the only, or even the primary, distribution center for goods consumed at Operation 7. Multiple procurement networks were operating during the Late Classic period to provision rural households with the goods they used. The recovery of a large number of imported ceramics and other goods with strong Teotihuacan affinities suggests integrated market networks, rather than solar market systems, operated to circulate goods throughout rural areas in Central Mexico. Comparative analysis of domestic assemblages is employed to identify differences in economic consumption that can be used to reconstruct the participation of rural households in regional distribution networks centered on their urban neighbors.

Debates over the cultural and biological origins of some indigenous groups in the Americas have fueled discussions about cultural identity, political justice, and resource rights. A historically high-profile case of rights and origins has involved the Araucanians or Mapuche of the southern cone of South America. This article examines, for the first time, the recent interdisciplinary archaeological and other anthropological evidence for the Mapuche of Chile and Argentina. It suggests that the ethnic and territorial origin of the Mapuche is in central and south-central Chile, although biological and cultural influences from north Chile and western Argentina also are present. It briefly discusses the implication of this study in relation to the indigenous status of the Mapuche in present-day Chile and Argentina.

Archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic evidence provides ample indication that water was a key symbol in Andean thought. During the late precolumbian era, the attention lavished on waterworks and features by the Inca emphasizes a clear concern with control over water and its movement. This paper examines the way in which specific relations of power and identity were constructed through Inca management of water. To this end, I offer a comparative analysis of water-related features from different sectors of the Empire, representing different moments in its historical development. The intent is to further our understanding of how the manipulation of water figured in the imperializing process and how its use and meaning may have evolved over time. The architectural evidence from the sites included in the study suggests that conspicuous exercise of control over the movement and flow of water may have been more critical to the establishment of Inca hegemony than to its subsequent maintenance.

The present paper aims to reconstruct lifestyle and health parameters of three populations from Puémape site on the Peruvian north coast, Central Andes, active during the Formative Period (2500-1 B.C.). Since the factors that led to social complexity and its relation to crop-based subsistence are still being discussed, this analysis of 85 well-preserved individuals using 12 osteological markers for nutritional and functional stress, infectious diseases, and interpersonal violence offers the opportunity to understand the biological dimension of this process. Although we observe auditory exostosis in all samples, indicating the continuing importance of marine resources, other paleopathological findings, in accordance with archaeological data, support the idea of profound changes in lifestyle related to the rise of social complexity in the region. These include a 10 cm height decrease, changes in nutritional stress markers, and an increase in degenerative joint diseases in vertebra but not in the appendicular skeleton, whereas infectious diseases and violent trauma became more frequent. Thus, in Puémape we witness considerable changes in the way of life across the Formative period, associated with changes in diet, division of labor, and social stratification.

This work reports the presence of Zea mays microremains in three feasting episodes performed during the Middle and Late Formative Period in the North Coast of Peru. The remains of the Cerro Blanco de Nepeña feasts may represent a step toward the intensification of Zea mays consumption in ritual contexts, related to changes in the ceramic assemblages, and parallel to the transformation of ritual spaces during the second half of the Formative Period.