Travaux de l'IFEA - Les établissements Asto à l’époque préhispanique

The aim of the A.C.L. Project was to study, through a multidisciplinary approach, the social organization and evolution up to now of three pre-Inca chiefdoms of the Central An-des cf Peru: the chiefdom of the Asto, and the adjacent Chunku and Laraw chiefdoms. A team of archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists and geneticians belonging to the French National Center of Scientific Research realized the fieldwork from 1970 to 1972 according to a collectively built planning.In this project, the archaeologists' work was 1) to locate the immediately pre-Spanish settlements and study their spatial distribution, their insertion in the physical milieu and their internal disposition; 2) to reconstitute the social and economic structures by analysing the construction and the technical equipment; and 3) to situate chronologically and culturally the Asto and their neighbours among the pre-Spanish tribes of the Central Andes, and estimate the impact of the Inca presence within each of the three groups.The present publication deals with the Asto whose twenty-seven villages were located along the Vilca and Mantaro valleys. The collected ceramics prove that all of them belong to the Late Intermediate Period. C14 dating indicates that some were occupied from the be-ginning of the XIth century AD. Therefore, the duration of the Asto occupancy would be of five hundred years. During the XVth century the Asto were conquered by the Inca and incorporated to their empire. The Asto villages were still in activity when the Spaniards arrived.The altitude of the villages ranges from 3 100 to 4 500 m above sea level (52% from 3 500 to 3 900 m). In all cases the settlement pattern is the same: it is based on aggregattes of circular edifices built on top of naturally well-protected mountains.…