Legacies in the Landscape: Borderland Processes in the Upper Moche Valley Chaupiyunga of Peru

This dissertation is a study of the Moche Valley chaupiyunga as a borderland over three millennia (~1600 BCE – ~1700 CE) with a focus on (1) settlement patterns and (2) how different polities interacted with the region over time. Nestled between the Andean highlands and the wide Pacific coastline, the chaupiyungas of the western Andes are geographic boundaries that often became demographic, political, cultural, and economic boundaries between peoples and polities in the past. The Moche Valley of Peru was the cradle of two influential political traditions – The Southern Moche and the Kingdom of Chimor – and a study of its chaupiyunga provides a lens into borderland processes at the edges of early polities. This dissertation combined a full-coverage pedestrian survey with legacy and historical data to model settlement patterns and understand how demographic, political, cultural, and economic boundaries transformed in the Upper Moche Valley chaupiyunga from 1600 BCE and up to the late 1700s CE. These data revealed deep pasts of settlement in the Upper Moche Valley chaupiyunga in which communities, polities, and places became bound together in the landscape over time. Moche political expansion into the chaupiyunga had a lasting impact on these borderlands as the huaca-colony of Katuay was established and canals were expanded up-valley. The later Kingdom of Chimor built off of Moche nodes of authority but generally had a more indirect approach to the more densely settled and conflict-ridden landscape of its chaupiyunga frontier. Generally, the many communities who navigated these borderlands could find continuity through binding themselves to previous settlements or to canalized lands. Political expansion into this borderland was thus a negotiation between existing landscapes and political traditions themselves. Similarly, both local communities and incoming polities could build or call upon older legacies to help secure their place in this often-contested landscape