Kevin J. Vaughn

HOUSEHOLD APPROACHES TO ETHNICITY ON THE SOUTH COAST OF
PERU: the Domestic Architecture of Early Nasca Society

Published in the edited volume Us and Them: The Assignation of
Ethnicity in the Andean Region, Methodological Approaches, edited
by Richard Reycraft. UCLA Institute of Archaeology, Los Angeles,
2005.

Abstract

While the spectacular ceramic style of the prehistoric Nasca culture is well
known among archaeologists, few other archaeological measures of
"ethnicity" have been employed in the study of this ancient society.
Following the methodological approaches of Stanish (1993), this paper
demonstrates that a "household archaeology" approach can be successfully
used to identify Early Nasca sites in the Nasca region of the south coast of
Peru. An architectural analysis of the prehistoric village community Marcaya
is followed by an analysis of the domestic architecture of other Early Nasca
sites in the region. It is argued that the domestic architecture of the Early
Nasca time period can be used as an independent measure of ethnicity.