South America

Manuel Calongos Curotto

Manuel received his bachelor’s degree from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru, in 2015. He is interested how the different Andean societies experienced change in their social organization as a result of the Inca expansion and conquest of the Andean territories. Specifically, Manuel research focuses in analyzing the differences in the management of territory during the Late Intermediate Period (AD 900 – 1476) and the Late Horizon (AD 1476 – 1532) in the Cañete valley, Lima, Peru. He wants to understand the social and political changes the local inhabitants of the Cañete valley experience after the Inca conquest of the valley.

Degrees and Education

BA - Archaeology - Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (2015)

Francisco García-Albarido

Francisco García-Albarido research how political-economic processes reshaped the socioeconomic structures of Latin-American local communities since the early modern era. One of his main objects of study is the interplay between colonial routes and market expansion in the South-Central Andes. In specific, Francisco is interested in how local communities engaged with the mercantile flow and made possible the market expansion, and how this participation crystallized new dimensions of inequality and consolidated new local elites. He is exploring these dynamics in the local communities that constituted the routes of Potosí both in Chile and Bolivia. Francisco earned a bachelor’s degree in archaeology at the University of Chile and a master’s degree in anthropology at Colorado State University. His professional experience includes more than a decade of survey, excavation and material culture analysis in the Atacama Desert and the Altiplano.

Victor Gonzales Avendano

Jose Victor Gonzales Avendaño is a PhD student in Archaeology, focused on Latin American Archaeology at the University of Pittsburgh. 

I received my initial training in archaeology from the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco (UNSAAC) where I obtained my B.S. in Archaeology in 2010 and Licentiate as an archaeologist in 2012. I have worked, support and directed several Archeological Research Projects that covered surveys, excavations and material analysis, mostly in the Cuzco Area covering a time frame from 1000 B.C. to the 16th century.

My research aims to explain the construction, transformation and reinforce of identities caused the impact of complex societies with hegemonic characteristics on local people in the Cuzco region, through material analysis, urban planning strategies and funerary practices.    

 

Degrees and Education

Bachelor in Archaeology degree given by the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco (2010)
Licentiate in Archaeology degree given by the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco (2012)

Ryan Smith

Ryan is interested in studying the organization and management of large-scale social and economic interaction networks in non-state societies and how these networks relate to social identity, conflict, subsistence, and shifts in political centralization. His dissertation research will explore a complex system of resource exchange and ritual interaction which connected highlands and lower-lying eastern valleys in the central Andes during late prehispanic periods (AD 1000-1530). One of the major goals of this research is to understand the development of these interaction networks in the Late Intermediate Period, a time marked by political segmentation and internecine conflict ushered by the fall of the Wari and Tiwanaku states around AD 1000 and lasting until the expansion of the Inca empire in the fifteenth century.