In South America, since the beginning of the 16th century, colonization introduced deep ruptures in the organization of pre-Hispanic societies of the Central Andean Area, corresponding to modern Peru. These changes have affected the daily life of these populations, disrupted by forced displacements, as well as their economic and cultural practices by the imposition of components of the European society such as the Christian cult. Andean Native populations have however perpetuated many ancient practices, through processes of resistance leading to a syncretism between pre-Hispanic and European traditions. This syncretism also occurred through the contacts between Andean Native populations and African and Afrodescendant slaves’ communities, who were forcefully brought to the Peruvian coasts from the beginning of the XVI century. The Colonial Period thus appears as a key period of the of the Andean Area. However, this period is most often written by historians from the analysis of archives produced by the colonial administration. The history of this period is therefore mainly a political and economic history from the Spanish perspective, providing limited insights on the daily life, the experiences and the negotiation processes of the Andean Native, African and Afro-descendant populations with the European norms. The MICA project aims to challenge the current state of research by generating groundbreaking hypotheses on the history of the ancient populations of the northern coast of Peru. This region is an outstanding case study to investigate the transition between the prehispanic and colonial periods, which witnessed the installation of several religious orders founding churches and villages where Spanish, Andean Native, African and Afrodescendant populations coexisted. In this region, colonial archaeology is an emerging discipline, which by means of a material and multiscalar approach addresses the relations between Europeans and Andean populations. These researches highlight the continuity of prehispanic practices, while testifying to processes of ethnogenesis. However, by focusing excavations on ritual contexts, very little scientific knowledge exists on the daily life of the Andean Native populations, and even less on the daily life of slaves, who remain the great forgotten of this research. By omitting the study of the relations between Andean Native and African communities, they also struggle to illustrate to what extent the interactions between Andean, African and Afrodescendants populations shaped the Peruvian national identity. The MICA project proposes to study for the first time three sites founded in the sixteenth century in the Jequetepeque Valley, to define the impact of the colonial regime on the domestic, social, economic, and cultural practices of the Andean Native, African and Afrodescendant populations during the first century of colonization. Through a material approach, based on the archaeological excavation of the Anlape and Omnep churches, the associated residential areas, as well as San Pedro de Lloco, the first town founded in the valley, the objective of this project is to contrast the historical knowledge of the period and to replace in the scientific discourse the perspective of Andean Native, African and Afrodescendant communities. This project is anchored on an international collaboration between European, Peruvian, and North American institutions, and stands outs by its highly multidisciplinary character, bringing together archaeological, historical, and sociocultural anthropological researchers. The project will found a replicable method for the study of colonial material remains, adapted to the challenges of the Andean context. The particularity of this research also lies in its implementation in an urban context, making it essential to couple its scientific interest to a social, cultural, and economic project with the authorities and local populations.

This project focuses on the relationships between two regions considered key to understanding major sociopolitical processes in Mesoamerican Highlands: Western Mexico and the Basin of Mexico. The study of the inter-regional social relations is a subject extensively explored by Mesoamerican archaeology, which traditionally relies for this purpose on the similarities between their respective material productions, especially pottery. Since the highlighting of a Tertium Quid in the Mexico Basin associated with Western ceramic traditions during the Early Formative (1000-800 BC), it has been a recurring topic of discussion. However, the nature of these links is still poorly understood because the proposals remain generally based on stylistic correspondences. Therefore, the CHUPICERAM project proposes to renew our comprehension of these relations by fully exploiting the information potential of the ceramic material in a comparative perspective. The project focuses on the Late Formative period (600 B.C. - 250 A.D), which witnessed the development of two cultural cores: Chupícuaro in the Lerma valley (Guanajuato) and Cuicuilco in the Basin of Mexico. During the XXs, stylistics analogies on ceramic materials between these two regions led to diverse interpretations, involving population movements, commercial interactions and political and ideological influences, which often granted Chupicuaro a primal position as a possible area of emigration or as a prominent ceramic production center disseminating its beautiful products over long distances. In order to clarify the nature and intensity of these relationships, CHUPICERAM will focus on the ceramic production processes from the raw materials acquisition strategy to the finished product. The project’s goals are to characterize the technical traditions specific to each region, understand the variations over time, establish and question the links between the different ceramic assemblages and discuss the topic in terms of economic, social and cultural proximity. One of CHUPICERAM's strengths is its willingness to apply a methodical comparative approach based on a representative sampling and integrating recent archaeological assemblages from the Chupícuaro region, and museum collections built up during excavations carried out in the first half of the twentieth century, both in the Chupícuaro region and the Mexico Basin. This is the first time that these different collections will be evaluated following the same analysis framework with high-performance instrumentation adapted to sherds and/or complete objects: techno-stylistic study based on the analytical tool of chaîne opératoire, petrographic and mineralogical characterization, a wide range of chemical analyses and a full set of non-invasive techniques including hyperspectral imaging, X Ray Radiography, 3D Imaging, X-ray fluorescence, visible-infrared light reflectance and Raman. We consider that only the crossing of all these data will make it possible to overcome the limits induced by stylistic analogies. The project brings together archaeologists, museum curators, geologists and specialists in applied physics and analytical chemistry from Mexican and French institutions, who will work on the same sample to answer the same questions. By pooling the French and Mexican expertise, CHUPICERAM is taking up the challenge of bringing to the forefront two still little-known cultures considered to be among the most singular and creative Formative Mesoamerican traditions.

Ubiquitous in life and death, mass-produced and extremely versatile in terms of pattern, color and choice of materials, Andean textiles attest to the social organization, symbolic believes and exchanges of non-literate preHispanic societies. Peru's north coast textiles have been manufactured with fibers of South American camelids since about 200 AD. For a long time, it was accepted, without direct proof, that the wool supply was restricted to the populations of 2 species (alpaca and vicuña) from the highlands. However, the other 2 camelid species (llama and guanaco) can also produce quality wool, and camelid remains have been found in lowland sites since at least 800 BC. AWASQA aims to diachronically describe 1) the chaine-opératoire for textiles from well-dated coastal archaeological sites and museum collections, 2) the taxonomic and geographical origin of animal fibers (raw material) through paleoproteomics and stable isotope analysis, and 3) the trajectory of local genetic lineages through a combined approach of paleogenomic and isotope analysis of archaeozoological remains. The combination of approaches developed by AWASQA is totally unprecedented and will make it possible to remove methodological obstacles, as the principle of actualism cannot be applied strictly to the pre-Hispanic period. Conceptually, we hypothesize that lowland societies overcame the severe environmental constraints they faced by adapting native highland pastoralism and developing their own production of raw materials. Our hypothesis questions the obligatory nature of certain exchanges between Andean ecological zones (the concept of Andean verticality).

The project “Mobility, territories and sociopolitical mutations within thenorthwest frontier of Mesoamerica” proposes to study the basis, patterns, and consequences of mobility in the dynamics of territorialization and the construction of social, political, economic, and technological systems of the prehispanic peoples who occupied the northern frontier of Mesoamerica. For thirty years, a French team of archaeologists from ArchAm has been collaborating with Mexican and North American archaeologists, to study West-central Mexico, a key region for understanding political and social change in ancient Mesoamerica. As early as the first millennium BC, West-central Mexico, a hybridand intermediary cultural zone between the western/northern regions and Central Mexico, was located at the heart of a vast system of regional and interregional circulation and interaction. These interactions are represented by the movement of tangible objects (goods, as well as people) and/or intangible material (ideas, savoir-faire, style) that moved along various axes (west/east, north/south, or east/west), depending on the temporal period in question. Archaeological documentation repeatedly demonstrates throughout the prehispanic sequence indicators of the consequences of this fluctuating population movement: - Rapid changes in the territorial organization, which manifest as decreases or increases in the number of settlements. These spatial reconfigurations are often associated with demographic fluctuations. -Significant changes in the material culture, particularly in architecture, funerary practices, savoir-faire, and access to resources. Far from being marginal, these population movements are of great importance when considered in the wider context of pan-Mesoamerican dynamics. They played a significant role in the evolution of cultural entities in West-central and Central Mexico, such as the Toltecs in the Early Postclassic, and the Tarascans and the Aztecs in the Late Postclassic. Archaeological research has demonstrated over the last 30 years that migratory mobility was a recurring trend in the history of west-central Mesoamerica. These findings thereby corroborate indigenous and Spanish ethnohistoric accounts of the 16th century, which attribute a foreign origin to the Toltecs, Aztecs, and Tarascans, originating in the arid regions of Northern Mexico. While archaeology now recognizes and documents these patterns of population movement, the fundamental processes that drove these movements are still poorly understood. Therefore, this project proposes to study the mechanisms behind these movements and to evaluate their impact on the dynamics of cultural development in west-central Mexico. It focuses on research carried out in several different areas of northern Michoacán (the Zacapu and Patzcuaro Basins) and the Lerma Valley. To consider these phenomena from a holistic perspective, a long-term diachronic approach is adopted, and particular attention is paid to the Preclassic (Middle and Terminal) and Postclassic (Early to Late) periods. The project’s goals are: 1) characterize rapid changes, 2) understand the mechanisms of social and political changes linked to the migratory phenomena, 3) demonstrate the capacity for adaptation and innovation for these societies. We rely on four indicators that require a fine chronological control (changes in settlement patterns, bio-archaeological markers, technological systems, circulation networks). The innovative character of this project lies in its interdisciplinary nature and the combined use of state-of-the-art technologies, designed to refine the spatial and chronologic resolution of phenomena of ancient mobility. The systemic approach of mobility, founded on questions regarding territory and the process of territorialization, represents a novel contribution to Mesoamerican archaeology. Thus, this project aims to provide a model approach that could be “exportable” to other contexts in Mesoamerica and beyond.

During the classic period (AD 250-950), the Maya interacted with many neighboring cultures, however, little is known about their interactions with more distant societies. Important quantities of iron ore mirrors and jade plaques, associated with the Maya elites, were thus found in Costa Rica some 1000 km away (AD 300-700). In the Maya area, Spondylus shells were often found in elite burials, but are absent from the Pacific coasts close to this area and abundant in the waters bordering Costa Rica. This project proposes to bring together archaeologists, archaeometers, traceologists and archaeozoologists to determine the areas of origin of these prestigious goods and to understand the nature and modalities of the relations between these regions. We will review all the available archaeological data on the studied objects in order to document their contexts and chronological frameworks. The study of their provenance will involve the chemical analyses of the stones and adhesives by a set of spectroscopic, chromatographic, datation and isotopic techniques. The manufacturing microtraces of stones will be characterized using traceology in order to understand the lapidary techniques and to determine whether they were imported or locally worked. Spondylus materials found in the Maya area will be submitted to malacological and isotopic analyses in order to distinguish their geographic sources. The iconographic and epigraphic study of the corpus of plaques and mirrors will enable us to document their origin, date and status in the Maya area. Finally, all data will be cross-referenced by being placed in geographic and chronological contexts in order to understand the distributions, productions, reuse and functions of these goods in the two regions. This project will enable us to rethink the old distinctions between what is called Mesoamerica and what is often considered as an "intermediate area" in order to define the entities composing them in a far more dynamic fashion.