Preface

The Ford Foundation, which promoted the creation of and has remained committed to area studies, recently advocated a revitalization of this field under the rubric of “crossing borders” (Ford Foundation 1999). The Ford Foundation articulates a proactive policy designed to foster “networks and new collaborations,” stating that ultimately, the revitalization of this crucial scholarly field should enhance international cooperation through an internationalized community of area studies, and foster a better informed citizenry (Ford Foundation 1999: vii). We conceive of the Handbook of South American Archaeology as a contribution to area studies and agree with the Ford Foundation’s intellectual platform. We have tried to achieve it in this volume through engagement of an international roster of scholars as well as the final section of the HSAA which considers the practice of South American archaeology in its contemporary context.

We feel a keen sense of legacy and fateful serendipity in having been offered the HSAA project by our wonderful editor at Springer, Teresa Krauss. Bill received his doctorate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in the anthropology department founded by Julian H. Steward in 1952. Bill was deeply influenced by the extraordinary Donald Lathrap, who taught a truly South American archaeology in vast ecological and evolutionary perspective at the University of Illinois. Helaine was strongly influenced by her training at Columbia University (where Steward had taught in 1946-1952, before moving to Illinois), where she studied with the great Edward Lanning (who brought a strong ecological and evolutionary perspective to Peruvian archaeology), Morton Fried (who had been taught by Steward at Columbia), and Robert Murphy (including as a research assistant to Dr. Murphy while he was editing Steward’s posthumous Evolution and Ecology). Steward was deeply involved in the Viru Valley Project, which became a benchmark in Peruvian archaeology. In 1991 Helaine began teaching at the University of Illinois.

Both of us came to the HSAA project with a profound understanding of and respect for Steward and his commitment to holistic, supra-areal anthropology. Teresa Krauss was unaware of Steward and our intellectual connections to him when she commissioned the HSAA as part of Springer’s new handbook series. We thank her for giving us this remarkable opportunity to contribute to the field that has impassioned us for many decades. We have learned an enormous amount and hope very much that readers will similarly benefit.

The greatest challenge we faced in producing the Handbook of South American Archaeology, after lining up authors, was how to organize its content. Any organizational scheme—from phylogenetic tree to chronological chart—seeks to organize knowledge. Julian H. Steward’s original geo-cultural scheme for the earlier Handbook of South American Indians (1946-1949) is still serviceable albeit theoretically and empirically dated as seen from our turn-of-the-twenty-first-century standpoint. In the case of the HSAA, our goal has been to usefully organize knowledge about the prehistory of this continent.

“Useful for teaching and scholarly consultation” has been our guiding premise. But academic reality indicates that few colleagues are teaching the whole continent, so we had to devise a scheme that accounts for greatly increased areal knowledge since the 1940s, promotes greater interareal comparison (so long as all chapters would be read), and stimulates the reader with new ideas.

Basically, the organizational possibilities for the HSAA seemed limited to three: geographical, the traditional culture areas, and temporal-evolutionary. Since this is a handbook, whose intent is to provide the reader with foundational archaeological information about particular societies and regions, in the end we saw no way but to deal with a mix of all: geography, culture area, and the Stewardian levels of sociocultural integration (i. e., moving across the continent from early settlements, to Archaic lifeways, to greater complexity, and finally “states and empires”). We have tried to not break apart certain areally synthetic chapters so that the evolutionary trajectories being described are not lost, while not essentializing particular regions such as the Central Andes. Also, we have tried to transcend fraught classifications by adding cross-cutting new topics such as patterns of interaction and death practices (although, for instance, Arriaza et al.’s Chinchorro chapter could easily have been placed in the latter section as could Gaspar et al.’s interpretation of the sambaquis as mortuary monuments) as well as by including examples from various parts of South America in most of the sections (except “states”).

We have organized the volume’s sections according to several grand themes that we see as salient, but recognize that other scholars would have chosen other themes. Alternative organizational schemes, which we considered seriously, would have produced an equally coherent volume. Also, even within the final framework certain chapters could have been placed in more than one section of the HSAA (for instance, Schaan’s treatment of Marajo Island could have been placed in the section on lowland moundbuilders and Heckenberger’s discussion of Amazonia could have been placed in the section on nonstate complexity). We have sought to strike a balance in the HSAA, yet recognize that criticism surely will be forthcoming when this volume is reviewed. The important thing is that the HSAA provides intensive and extensive coverage of South American prehistory. We propose that readers and, particularly, professors use this volume’s chapters according to whatever sequential, geographic, or thematic scheme they are most comfortable with.

Our final organizational decision has privileged the commission we received from Springer to create a handbook which we and the publisher understand as a reference work to be consulted for basic information. Thus, each author was asked to lay out the major issues in his/her region or time period or archaeological culture, present an up-to-date assessment, and provide sufficient bibliographic references for the interested reader to pursue the topic further. Moreover, we have highlighted important debates in South American archaeology, some of which run through several related chapters (note, for instance, the arguments of the Pozorskis, Makowski, and Burger). Interpretive disagreements among several sets of authors are reflections of the exciting threshold stage of particular regional and macro-regional archaeologies at this moment.

We especially call your attention to the way we have arranged Part VI on “Demographic and Cultural Expansions.” We envision this section as a circle, beginning with the dramatic situation on the coast of Peru in the third through mid-first milleniums BC as fascinatingly analyzed by Shelia and Tom Pozorski, leading logically into Krzysztof Makowski’s consideration of Andean urbanism, then considering a set of population movements documented by Francisco Noelli in Amazonia, then leading into Tiffiny

Tung’s comparative case study of migration in the Central Andes, and finally returning to the end of the Pozorskis’ discussion through the focus of Richard Burger’s chapter, which is the great Chavln horizon, itself involving “proto-urbanism” but not state-level organization. This then sets the stage for the following section on Central Andean states and empires, Part VII. Here we have placed Dulanto’s discussion of many less centralized (comparatively speaking) late prehispanic societies that existed in the centuries between the fall of the Wari Empire and rise of the Incas, and contemporaneously with the great Chimu Empire, and that are the realpolitik context of various decisions made by the Inca imperial administration.

For every chapter included, other chapters that were discussed by the editors in the commissioning stage were not included. This was due to two factors. First, lack of space but not lack of interest. Given the mammoth size of the HSAA we had to make decisions about what areas or problems to eliminate. It was simply impossible to include every precolumbian culture (notably in the Central Andes) or region. The areas that have seen the most research have received more attention in the volume than other areas. Second, regrettably, several important chapters that we commissioned were never turned in despite our repeated exhortations to their intended authors and attempts to secure alternate authors [Note 1]. Finally we had to go to press without these chapters as timely publication of the HSAA had to take precedence over exhaustive coverage of the continent. Hopefully, timely publication of the HSAA compensates for omissions by stimulating future discussion and research on the issues brought to the fore or, to the contrary, under-represented in its pages.

The task of actually putting the volume together has been arduous. Papers were read, sent back for revision, and received and edited again, then formatted in standardized manner. Some spellings have been regularized, but the orthography of many terms varies among chapters according to author preferences. For many of the papers written by English-as-a-second-language or non-English speakers, texts had to be checked and double-checked to make sure that editing or translation did not change the meaning from the original language of the author. We have emphasized easy readability over literal translation.

Figures underwent various modifications but some illustrations were never made as high quality as we would have liked authors to have done. Also, a few authors did not send their figures (again, despite repeated pleas); their absence in those chapters is greatly lamented. But we could not hold up the volume’s production schedule further.

There also are some missing or incomplete references because authors did not provide these and we were unable to generate them.

Communication was sometimes difficult as many of the contributors were in and out of the field around the entire continent over the past two years, resulting in some issues remaining unresolved. Prompt and current publication seemed more important than waiting to include the missing materials. We hope readers will not be distracted by these flaws and generously understand our editorial constraints.

We thank all contributors for their papers. Truly, we are thrilled with the coverage of the volume, the quality of the chapters, and how much we have learned about South American archaeology from the contributors.

We conclude by expressing our enormous admiration for the original Handbook of South American Indians. It remains a magnificent compilation of knowledge about South American archaeology and ethnography and has served as an inspiration for decades of fieldwork thereafter.