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The 1971 publication of the SAA memoir on mortuary practices edited by James A. Brown was the harbinger of a set of approaches to the archaeology of mortuary remains that continues to inform a variety of robust worldwide research programs. Two major themes that developed out of that memoir, combined with Saxe’s (1970) dissertation, are the interpretation of systematic variation in mortuary treatment as a reflection or statement of social, political, and economic differentiation, and the relationship between mortuary practices, formal cemeteries, and settlement systems that came out of Saxe’s Hypothesis 8 (Saxe 1970: 119; see Brown 1995).

At least one region of the world, the Andes, has seen relatively little application of general archaeological mortuary theory, although it contains some of the richest and most fascinating mortuary remains found anywhere. Rich ethnohistoric and iconographic data often allow detailed but highly culturally specific interpretations of mortuary remains for all but the earliest of Andean archaeological cultures. The rich local record may help to explain why some aspects of archaeological mortuary theory have been relatively ignored by many Andeanists (see Brown 1995). In this paper, I examine one of the earliest mortuary traditions in the region, and one that is among the most challenging to interpret: the Chinchorro (roughly 7000 to 4000 BP) of the south-central Andes. Using a regional approach to the data, combined with the application of theoretical approaches that come directly from the tradition of mortuary analysis that has developed during the past three decades, I interpret ancient Chinchorro mortuary …