ABSTRACT
The pots diagnostic of the La Candelaria archaeological culture have been pulled out of ancient burials since the mule trains of early archaeologists traversed the yungas of Salta and Tucuman provinces in the late nineteenth century. La Candelarians were clearly concerned to present their natural environment in their ceramics, including peccaries, amphibians, water fowl, foxes, vines, water, exuberant forms that seem to grow. The sense of emergent forms is strong in La Candelaria pots. In the La Candelaria material, human skeletal bodies show evidence of having been worked on in life and death: traces of piercings, cranial modification, disarticulation, and secondary burial indicate a desire to ensure that certain transformations and states were achieved. Approaches in material culture studies that highlight social and cultural construction explore how artefacts take on cultural meaning through complex processes of manufacture and circulation. Hurcombe explains that artefacts as material culture embody social relations, encode social information and communicate meaning.
