Fine Dining and Fabulous Atmosphere: Feasting Facilities and Political Interaction in the Wari Realm

Recently, Andean archaeologists have stressed that feasts were important events in the development of complex political formations because these events were where relations of power were established, maintained, and renegotiated (Cook and Glowacki 2003; Gero 2001; Janusek 2004). The activity of feasting holds a prominent role in descriptions of political interaction in the Andean past, and thus material remains of these practices should be well represented in the archaeological record. Many kinds of social gatherings documented historically and ethnographically can be considered feasts because they include suprahousehold meal preparation and consumption. The challenge to archaeologists lies in distinguishing among different kinds of events and outlining the role different types of feasts played in the social, political, and economic relations of a polity or more broadly in a multi-polity interaction sphere. To meet this challenge this case study will describe and compare the details of several Wari-related feasting contexts to understand the significance of the different events