Wari power, Wari people: Building critical perspectives on state expansion at Hatun Cotuyoc, Huaro, Peru

In the first millennium AD, a society known as Wari formed in the Ayacucho region of Peru and spread across the Andes to establish an extensive network of colonies in a time period known as the Middle Horizon (AD 600-1000). Among the various places in which Wari people settled, the Cusco region plays an important role in our understanding of the development of Wari society and statecraft. Motivations for and the manner of Wari expansion are hotly debated topics and much of both controversy and consensus centers on the archaeological record of this region. There, Wari investment at Pikillacta, a large complex following state architectural canons, represents some of the best evidence for the extension of Wari political authority abroad and thus has figured heavily into models of the Wari as an empire. However, another Wari settlement slightly further south at Huaro has a different character. Limited evidence of settlement planning and attributes of local cultural styles hint that it was not controlled by the state to the same degree. This, combined with research demonstrating limits to Wari power in the larger region, prompts critical reconsideration of why and how Wari people expanded into this region and across Peru.;Reviewing cross-cultural cases of colony foundation and development in the ancient world, this thesis stresses that colonization is not always a state-driven process, and it is always one that multiple social groups contribute to. Rather than viewing colonization solely as a means of annexing territory and extending administration over foreign groups, we should consider other ways in which members of Wari society spread networks of settlement and interaction across Peru. Colonies may also advance interregional trade and alleviate demographic pressures of growing urban polities; in each of these scenarios, individuals and communities may play important roles in founding colonies abroad. With this in mind, I evaluate the expansion of political, economic and social networks of the Wari that extended to the Cusco region with settlement at Huaro and Pikillacta, as well as how they evolved through time.;Research carried out at Hatun Cotuyoc, a domestic sector of settlement at Huaro, comes to bear on these points. It reveals that the Wari state intervened very little to shape life for residents of the Huaro colony during its earliest occupation phases. People at Hatun Cotuyoc maintained lifeways similar to those of Ayacucho, but most production, consumption, and other activity at the site was oriented around local needs, consistent with expectations of demographic colonization. However, throughout the Middle Horizon economic networks connecting Hatun Cotuyoc residents to exotic trade goods circulated by the Wari were amplified and the settlement was reorganized by an administrative authority. These changes co-occur with substantial expansion of the Pikillacta site, and may represent additional evidence for the growth of state power through time. These finds contribute to evolving perspectives on Wari power, most notably in that they do not support the idea that Wari entered the region as a powerful conquest state. Instead, state power developed incrementally and in some places, followed colonization sponsored by social groups not directly connected to Wari administration.