ABSTRACT
Scholarship on Tiwanaku (500–1000 ce) emphasizes the ceremonial nature of the state’s capital city and the role of ritual practice in both distinguishing and incorporating diverse groups as the state’s influence expanded across the south central Andes. In this chapter, I explore how different kinds of ritual were impacted when the state began a process of fragmentation ca. 1000 ce. I propose that ritual practice was critical in the shifting sociopolitical landscape brought about by collapse. Tiwanaku’s political collapse took place over several centuries and state breakdown was not swiftly followed by political regeneration but by 500 years of decentralization. Drawing on data spanning those centuries in the Moquegua Valley, Peru I explore the diachronic rhythms of post-collapse ritual to highlight significant temporal differences in public, funerary, and household ritual following Tiwanaku’s political disintegration. In the shorter term (1000–1250 ce), many Tiwanaku rituals were maintained but subtle shifts in funerary rites and the resituating of public ceremonies reveal how populations confronted intra- and inter-community tensions. In the longer term (post-1250 ce), Tiwanaku public-ceremonial space was abandoned, but elements of household and funerary ritual endured for another century until all were ultimately usurped as the long term legacy of collapse played out.
