Contenu du sommaire : Varia

The Wari Empire was an expansive state that incorporated many groups in the Peruvian Andes ca. AD600-1000. The ruling members of Wari society established asymmetrical relations with many regional polities or replaced them with state officials. In the provincial centers of this powerful empire, state officials interacted with regional leaders. Regional leaders, in many instances, did the same and continued to manage their followers through socio-political interactions as they were subsumed in the Wari political economy. Formal monumental settings for important socio-political relations underpinning the centralization of the Wari state were built in a few provincial areas, and have been interpreted as administrative centers, however socio-political relations crucial to maintaining power and control over many regions were not limited to these monumental centers. Socio-political connections between laborers and administrators would have been important at a number of scales and a complex hierarchy should be present if Wari is a state as many archaeologists suggest. This paper describes the use of space in elite residences at the Wari site of Cerro Mejia and demonstrate that these residential settings were organized around important political activities, such as holding meetings and hosting feasts, and other activities that would have played an important role in establishing and maintaining control of small regional groups incorporated into the Wari political sphere. Excavations on Cerro Mejia and comparisons with elite residences on Cerro Baúl, both located in Moquegua, provide a good example of how houses were used and designed to facilitate asymmetrical power relations in the early Andean Wari Empire.

New fieldwork in the Pastaza region coupled with the study of museum collections, allow us to describe the Muitzentza tradition. The ceramic materials of this tradition are dominated by bowls and necked jars and tinajas decorated in red and white painting. The decoration consists mainly of white painting on red, or red or white on an unslipped surface. An AMS date indicates an age around the XI-XII centuries A.D. It is likely that Zaparoan speakers, historic occupants of the region, are derived from a Muitzentza background.

The Chiriguanas of the Andean foothills (Bolivia) were a constant threat to the Audiencia de Charcas, and several facts suggest that they were also a threat to the Incas themselves. Nevertheless, a critical comparison of XVIth century testimonies and chronicles reveals certain «contradictions» that allow to rethink «the origin» of Chiriguana domination. This paper argues for a recent —even colonial— process of regional domination by the Guaraní speaking groups of the Eastern Charcas frontier.

Since the 1950's, studies of the theatrical representations of «Atahualpa's death» tend to depict these as being a legacy of the so-called Inca theatre. After briefly examining the historiographic mechanisms that led to this general opinion, this article offers new avenues of investigation, highlighting the existing relationship between the plays about «Atahualpa's death» and Spanish representations of «Moors and Christians» through the use of a comparative study of both traditions. This article underlines the need to revise such commonly accepted interpretations of these dramas and opens up the debate to allow new hypotheses.

Most of those who have documented the Amerindian cultures, following their own ideas and ideologies have confined women to the domestic and private sphere, and men to the political and public one. They have also attributed to these spheres of social life different values, trying to find relations of domination homologous to those that existed in the «western» culture. The hunter-gatherers societies of the Gran Chaco were not an exception to this construction of women's subordination. Some ethnographic data among the Toba (Qom) people of the Argentinean Chaco, allow to revisit the sexual division of work proposed by some ethnographers of the Toba people. The author intends to provide a different interpretation to that provided by the old sources by focusing on the voices of Toba women themselves.