A taste of Tiwanaku: daily life in an ancient Andean urban center as seen through cuisine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores issues of identity at Tiwanaku, the urban cosmopolitan capital of an ancient Andean polity. This is done through an in-depth investigation of domestic culinary practices within the non-elite neighbourhood of Mollo Kontu. Recent research on the creation and maintenance of Tiwanaku socio-political relations has emphasized the importance of communal feasting events as the process through which residents were integrated into a broad Tiwanaku inclusive state identity. In particular, the consumption of maize beer (chicha), and the use of attractive ceramic paraphernalia attached to chicha production and consumption, are viewed as key aspects of the consensual integration to the Tiwanaku lifestyle. Results from my investigation of everyday culinary practices suggest that this Tiwanaku state inclusive identity was not as universally accepted as previously suggested. A detailed analysis of faunal remains from selected domestic contexts is presented and integrated with ceramic, paleoethnobotanical, ichtyoarchaeological, and bioarchaeological results, to illustrate the chaîne opératoire of cuisine at Mollo Kontu. I demonstrate that its residents managed their own camelid herds for meat production and consumption, independently from the Tiwanaku state. Their presence represents the exploitation of a shared food preference rather than an epiphenomenon of the residents' economic and political situation. Mollo Kontu daily cuisine emphasized and valued the ingestion of local resources, especially domesticated camelids, in contrast to the Tiwanaku state identity manifested in the commensal consumption of beer made of non-local maize. This suggests both an independence from the state, and the reinforcement of a local highland identity through the ingestion of locally produced staples, in an increasingly cosmopolitan urban context. Combined with isotopic results which showed Mollo Kontu residents consumed little maize, I argue that Mollo Kontu residents did not fully embrace the pluri-ethnic nature of the Tiwanaku state; in their daily lives they embraced their local roots through their culinary practices.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".