CONCLUSION

This chapter has examined ancient religious practices and beliefs in the Andes, with a broad focus on the durable idols of ancestor cults. Ethnohistoric and historic accounts provide a range of possibilities by which archaeologists can contextualize pre-Columbian

Objects and settings. The perspective I advocate examines what people did around Andean images and stresses how things were perceived as social others.

Two basic points should be recapitulated. First, ancestor images are like persons: they actively embody social relationships and mediate physical interaction between the living and ancestral divinity. I have described what some ancestors could move people to do. Ancestor images were not simply static representations or symbols, but objects that were actively handled, used and re-imagined for specific purposes, frequently over long periods of time.

Second, many Andean ancestor images were crucial because they were like esteemed relatives. Effigies were agents by which the potency of deceased forebears could continue to be channeled for the benefit of worshippers. The available evidence strongly suggests that the language used to describe the images, the contexts for their storage/veneration, and their physical interactions followed tropes of family and descent (real or fictive). Ancestors were venerated because, like close relations, descendants had obligations to them. Cult images drew life from and prolonged this commitment.

Acknowledgments Fieldwork at Chinchawas was conducted under Resolucion Directo-ral Nacional 419-96/INC, and was supported by the National Science Foundation (SBR-9612574) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (No. 6066). Additional research funding, enabling many of the arguments presented here, has been provided by the British Academy and the Sainsbury Research Unit. I would like to thank Ludo Coupaye, Steve Hooper and various SRU students for helping me to think through some ideas about ancestral things; any errors remain my own.