CONCLUSION

The people who settled in the Titicaca basin gained an increasing sense of place and ownership over time. Their separate polities developed authority and identity through demarcating and celebrating the sacred and the powerful on the landscape and the living ancestors. Intensification occurred in all subsistence realms, especially when the lake retreated. The landscape, architecture, and iconographic evidence of the Titicaca basin in the Formative Period portrays a picture of increasing unification by certain population clusters that channeled labor out of the web of nested kin/ayllu groups. The political evidence for these changes is seen in the religious manifestations and ancestor ideologies placed in the constructed ceremonial centers. Everything, including politics, seemed to be colored by ritual; ritual and its associated community feasting has always been a powerful force in politics throughout Andean prehistory (and history). Toward the end of this long sequence, the political structures bumped up against each other, causing a general shift from interaction to confrontation. Aggressive power became part of the iconic codes. And with this competition, came civic ceremonial elaboration that bred an increased sense of centralization, seen at sites like Pukara and Tiwanaku, but also at Lukurmata and Khonko Wankane (the discussion of Titicaca basin cultural development continues in Chapter 37). With evidence for group rituals and feasting, selective access to exotic goods, and labor for constructing stone edifices, the population was realigning itself from autonomy to hegemony, at the end of the renaissance of sustainability and autonomy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This chapter is primarily based on recent archaeological research in which I have been involved, for which I am very grateful to Chip Stanish, John Janusek, Matt Bandy, Lee Steadman, Bill Whitehead, Jose Luis Paz and Kate Moore. The National Directorate of Archaeology in La Paz, Bolivia, especially Javier Escalante and Eduardo Pareja, have graciously allowed archaeological research to move forward. Chip Stanish has devoted

Much time to informing me of the northern data upon which I have based much of my interpretations here. The National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society have both funded my archaeological time in the region and for that I am especially grateful.