Elizabeth Arkush


Elizabeth Arkush Assistant Professor PhD University of California, Los Angeles, 2005
My research centers on the interplay of warfare, political power, social identity, and ritual in the prehispanic Andes. I am particularly interested in the potential of regional approaches, including GIS analysis, to illuminate these social processes in space. My doctoral research focused on the later part of the prehispanic sequence after about A.D. 1000, when many small polities throughout the Andes were apparently engaged in cycles of endemic warfare. Fieldwork on a suite of fortified hilltop sites in the northern Lake Titicaca basin in Peru investigated the regional patterns that emerged from conflictual and cooperative social relationships. This study also examined the chronology of fortification to question current interpretations of the causes of intergroup violence at the time. Other field projects have also relied on spatial approaches, but in the service of different questions. My master's research focused on regional patterns of ceremonial site construction in the southwest Titicaca Basin as a field of interaction and negotiation between imperial Inca administrators and provincial subjects. My most recent fieldwork involves the detailed mapping and intra-site spatial analysis of several large fortified sites with complex surface architecture. This initial stage will be followed up by excavations intended to examine social hierarchy, economic organization, and community dynamics at one large, well-preserved fortified center. As archaeologists come to a better understanding of the prevalence of warfare in the prehistoric past, I continue to be fascinated by questions about its causes, uses, and consequences. I prefer to think of warfare as neither an extraordinary crisis nor a normal state of affairs, but a multifaceted social institution which, as it ravaged lives, families, and communities, also generated power relationships, defined and maintained social boundaries, informed gender identities, and supplied a rich source of images and narratives to be interwoven with belief and expressed in material culture. Specializations Andean archaeology, complex societies, violence and warfare, regional analysis, ethnohistory, GIS applications. Courses Introduction to Archaeology, Warfare and Society, Archaeology of the Andes. Selected Publications Forthcoming - Warfare, space, and identity in the south-central Andes: constraints and choices. In Warfare in Cultural Context: Practice, Agency, and the Archaeology of Conflict, edited by Axel E. Nielsen and William H. Walker. Amerind Foundation Advanced Seminar Series, Dragoon, Ariz. 2006 - (With Mark W. Allen, eds.). The Archaeology of Warfare: Prehistories of Raiding and Conquest. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. 2005 - (With Charles Stanish). Interpreting conflict in the ancient Andes: implications for the archaeology of warfare. Current Anthropology 46 (1) 3-28. 2005 - Inca ceremonial sites in the southwest Titicaca Basin. In Advances in the Archaeology of the Titicaca Basin, edited by C. Stanish, A. Cohen, and M. Aldenderfer, pp. 209-242. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, UCLA, Los Angeles.

Assistant Professor
PhD University of California, Los Angeles,
2005

My research centers on the interplay of warfare, political power, social identity, and ritual in the prehispanic Andes. I am particularly interested in the potential of regional approaches, including GIS analysis, to illuminate these social processes in space. My doctoral research focused on the later part of the prehispanic sequence after about A.D. 1000, when many small polities throughout the Andes were apparently engaged in cycles of endemic warfare. Fieldwork on a suite of fortified hilltop sites in the northern Lake Titicaca basin in Peru investigated the regional patterns that emerged from conflictual and cooperative social relationships. This study also examined the chronology of fortification to question current interpretations of the causes of intergroup violence at the time.

Other field projects have also relied on spatial approaches, but in the service of different questions. My master's research focused on regional patterns of ceremonial site construction in the southwest Titicaca Basin as a field of interaction and negotiation between imperial Inca administrators and provincial subjects. My most recent fieldwork involves the detailed mapping and intra-site spatial analysis of several large fortified sites with complex surface architecture. This initial stage will be followed up by excavations intended to examine social hierarchy, economic organization, and community dynamics at one large, well-preserved fortified center.

As archaeologists come to a better understanding of the prevalence of warfare in the prehistoric past, I continue to be fascinated by questions about its causes, uses, and consequences. I prefer to think of warfare as neither an extraordinary crisis nor a normal state of affairs, but a multifaceted social institution which, as it ravaged lives, families, and communities, also generated power relationships, defined and maintained social boundaries, informed gender identities, and supplied a rich source of images and narratives to be interwoven with belief and expressed in material culture.

Specializations

Andean archaeology, complex societies, violence and warfare, regional analysis, ethnohistory, GIS applications.

Courses

Introduction to Archaeology, Warfare and Society, Archaeology of the Andes.

Selected Publications

Forthcoming - Warfare, space, and identity in the south-central Andes: constraints and choices. In Warfare in Cultural Context: Practice, Agency, and the Archaeology of Conflict, edited by Axel E. Nielsen and William H. Walker. Amerind Foundation Advanced Seminar Series, Dragoon, Ariz.
2006 - (With Mark W. Allen, eds.). The Archaeology of Warfare: Prehistories of Raiding and Conquest. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
2005 - (With Charles Stanish). Interpreting conflict in the ancient Andes: implications for the archaeology of warfare. Current Anthropology 46 (1) 3-28.
2005 - Inca ceremonial sites in the southwest Titicaca Basin. In Advances in the Archaeology of the Titicaca Basin, edited by C. Stanish, A. Cohen, and M. Aldenderfer, pp. 209-242. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, UCLA, Los Angeles.