Kylie Quave

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at George Washington University

Radiocarbon dates can offer important corollaries for historic events and processes, including territorial expansion and consolidation in early empires. Eighteen new radiocarbon dates from test excavations at Ak'awillay, near the Inca imperial capital of Cuzco, reveal new perspectives on interactions between the Incas and Xaquixaguana Valley groups...

The Inka empire's expansion incorporated diverse cultural and ecological elements in microcosmic representations of their empire. Imperial practices included the resettlement of communities from various regions into labour enclaves near Inka ceremonial, administrative and economic hubs. This degree of imperial control might suggest a limitation on...

Many of us learned to cite sources to avoid plagiarism or to give credit. Yet there are many more generative reasons to teach and learn citation. This essay offers a teacher’s perspective and a student’s perspective on our personal journeys toward viewing and practicing citation as a way of joyfully generating community with others. We describe our...

Inspired by Bradley Parker’s cross-cultural approach to households in imperial settings (Parker and Foster 2012; Boozer et al. 2020), we are interested in how social and kinship networks shape imperial and colonial processes at the level of domestic life in the Andean highlands. Parker championed a genre of research for developing material correlat...

This section of Andean Past consists of short reports on macrofloral remains from the Peruvian Early Horizon site of Cayan, on vertebrate remains from Cayan, on a Ychsma or Inca mortuary bundle, and on figurines from the Mareniyoc site in the Callejon de Huaylas.

A legacy of theories of culture change and assimilation is the assumption that the more intrusive the imperial social engineering policies, the more Indigenous cultures change. Instead, we argue that Indigenous cultural persistence can flourish despite imperial consolidation. We describe two ways that Indigenous identities are reinforced under impe...

Teaching introductory archaeology courses in US higher education typically falls short in two important ways: the courses do not represent the full picture of who contributes to reconstructing the past and do not portray the contemporary and future relevance of the archaeological past. In this paper, we use anti-colonial and decolonial theories to...

Teaching introductory archaeology courses in U.S. higher education typically falls short in two important ways: the courses do not represent the full picture of who contributes to reconstructing the past, and they do not portray the contemporary and future relevance of the archaeological past. In this article, we use anti-colonial and decolonial th...

Inka imperial policies reorganized the social and labor landscapes of their subjects on a grand scale and unprecedented degree in the Americas. The two most numerous categories of resettled laborers created by these imperial policies were the mitmaqkuna and yanakuna, who together represented at least a third of the total subject population. The Ink...

Inka imperial policies reorganized the social and labor landscapes of their subjects on a grand scale and unprecedented degree in the Americas. The two most numerous categories of resettled laborers created by these imperial policies were the mitmaqkuna and yanakuna, who together represented at least a third of the total subject population. The Ink...

State expansion brings cultural change or persistence, and foodways reveal how status and identity result from these events. We examine diet choices and food service at two large villages in the Inka imperial heartland (Cuzco, Peru). Yunkaray was occupied during the time of early Inka expansion (eleventh to fifteenth centuries), whereas Cheqoq hous...

Es frecuente, en los estudios sobre arqueología de unidades domésticas, identificar viviendas a través de la contextualización de arquitectura superficial. Sin embargo, ¿cuáles son las herramientas disponibles ante la ausencia o pobre preservación de contextos arquitectónicos con valor arqueológico? Este artículo aborda tal interrogante a raíz de n...

In the highland Andes during the centuries leading to Inca imperial expansion (ca. a.d. 1400–1530s), the people of the Cuzco Basin established alliances and rivalries with diverse neighbors living across the Cuzco region. Among the most powerful of those groups was a polity centered at Yunkaray (occupied ca. a.d. 1050–1450) on the Maras Plain just...

Horizontal excavations at the large Inka heartland village of Cheqoq (Maras, Cuzco, Peru) revealed the remains of a ceramic workshop where imperial-style vessels were produced (AD 1400–1530s). Cheqoq was a multiethnic settlement of forcibly migrated retainer laborers working for the noble lineage of the Inka ruler, Wayna Qhapaq. Production of imper...

This paper uses documents generated by the 1594–1595 composiciones de tierras in Cuzco, Peru, to discuss the economic transformation of the former heartland of the Inca Empire and the impact of Spanish administrative policies implemented in the early 1570s. The diverse social and environmental landscapes of rural areas lying to the west of Cuzco pr...

Research suggests that object-based, active learning enhances student experiences and learning outcomes. The Logan Museum of Anthropology has devoted significant resources to student-centered, inquiry-based learning. To determine if and how collections use was associated with enhanced learning across the curriculum of Beloit College, the museum’s p...

The ability to accumulate and store large amounts of goods is a key feature of complex societies in ancient times. Storage strategies reflect the broader economic and political organization of a society and changes in the development of control mechanisms in both administrative and non-administrative—often kinship based— sectors. This is the first...