Do you ever wonder what happens when the police leave? Crime scene cleaners are private companies that handle the cleanup after the police are gone. Spalling DeCon is one of the nation's largest cleanup companies handling the aftermath of homicides, suicides, decompositions, hoarding, and much more. These are our stories. Gary and Brayden to Florida on a hoard mission today. So someone was living with her that she didn't realize was a drug abuser and he had like an episode one night and beat the crap out of her. She just stopped caring, so she just started to barricade herself in. You reading the paper? March 26, 2016. A dead bird in there and she said that she thought that she was coming back frequently enough to feed the birds, but apparently not, so the bird starved to death. Today started out really shitty. 7 a.m. I get a call from Fiona and Thad that our dump trailer is missing and the lock was cut on our property.  What's up, dude? How you doing? I'm chilling. I'm feeling great. I'm out here, you know, chilling. Such a beautiful morning. Got to wake up this morning, see you another day. Beautiful because of you. You know what? So kind. I had a epiphany last night, man. Oh, Sharon. Sharon. Had to come into Jesus' moment. Okay. I'm going to bury the hatchet with the Pokemon Goers. Oh. It's a big moment. Yeah. Woke up sweating from it. So much stuff going on in the world, man. Craziness, pandemics, racism. So I'm just like, man, it's not that serious. It's just not that serious. You got to wake up. You got to see another day. You're blessed. You're fortunate. You're thankful. Whether you feel like you are or not, you are. So for all the Pokemon Goers, I apologize. It's getting out of control. I might break down, you know. Oh, no. All right, buddy. Hey, you did good. It's, uh, but all my Pokemon Goers, I accept you all. I don't even remember where this feud started, but I'm glad this is how it ended. This is a good resolution. I'm burning this out. Yeah. Slowly. Okay. Yeah, I shouldn't. I shouldn't take the cover. I'm putting the cover over that. Yeah. Right now. And I'm buried. Okay. So for all you amazing, incredible, intelligent, phenomenal Pokemon Goers, I apologize. People's champion. With that, sign it off. You're going to get me walking? Yeah. Get this side. Okay. Like superheroes. I don't remember. Like there's literally a blanket of cobwebs that cover from her kitchen, dining room to the living room, but she doesn't have cats or dogs. But what's the poop on the floor then? I don't know. So there's a bowl and it looks like it's dog food, but she said there's no dogs or cats. There's got to be rats or mice. That paper's just stacked. So someone was living with her that, uh, she didn't realize was a drug abuser.  She just stopped caring. So she just started to barricade herself in. It was like a her own personal sense of security. And a lot of time with these hordes, I really don't like to get into their personal because a lot of them are not mentally there already. Yeah. Start having these flashbacks. They start reliving. So if they want to openly be opinionated and want to just give that to us, you know, on their own, you know, I'll be there to listen. We don't want to dig. And empathize. I don't want to feel like I'm prying in. I just want them to be comfortable. Just let them know that, you know, help is here. You don't have to worry anymore. I'm making the call for us to come out. It's like the biggest step. Oh, she made the call herself. Yeah. That is, that's different than most clients. It seems like usually a family member does it. So at least with her. Solving your problems. A lot of times they're super like ashamed, you know, if they're living conditions. Embarrassed. So they always have a fear that like someone's going to judge them. Which I mean society judges. Yeah. You know, society doesn't care to look at the deeper level and be like, no, there's actually an issue here. They look at it at face value and just start making judgments and assuming people's lifestyle when that's not how it is. I said, glad we can help and shed a little light on this for you. So that way we can make it into a good living condition for you.  It had to actually commit suicide, you know. Just your way of handling it at the time. It doesn't matter because you don't matter. Well, I hope you know that you do matter. Oh, that's why you're here. You're knowing that's why I'm here. We're here to help and be of some type of assistance to you guys. So that way, you know, it doesn't happen moving forward. You don't have to worry about letting anybody else in my house again. They're having that sort of feeling. There you go. Yeah. We'll put you at peace. Yeah. You know, put a calmness over it. Just a calmness blanket. Just shed some light on it for you. It's all gonna be okay. Absolutely. We're in Bradenton, Florida on a Horde mission today. To me, this is category five. Easy. All day. It's a level five. It's not livable. A lot of trash. A lot of cobwebs. Like a blanket of cobwebs. Can't even really get through the door. We've only been able just to see the living room. We haven't been able to make it any further past that. So she said there's no dead cats or dogs, but there are at least two dead birds that are in the cages that she wants us to get out of the cage so the cages can be donated. I'm thinking there may be some mice in there because this is just like typical mice, typical rose, typical spider type, you know, living. It's like a rat's heaven. Oh, for sure. What are the floors like? Can't see them for real. No, it's packed so high, but I think what's paper, but something's saturated. But it's almost like soft. It's like heaps, like a little... It's not a flat surface at all. No, you can't even see the floor. There's so much debris and trash. She hasn't been in the home in like a year and a half, she's basically been paying for, you know, a house that she hasn't been at just because she just doesn't feel comfortable being there and it's very embarrassed to be in there. This is August 23rd, 2019. Looks pretty fermented. So the flooring is ceramic tile. Overneath the... That's what she said. Which I'm happy about because carpet would suck. This is the one she wanted to keep. Yeah. Yeah, you're going to get decapitated by that thing. Watch it. Oh, hey. I'm good. You're so close. Ooh. Ready? Golf bag? Yeah. What's the last table? What's the last table? It's really difficult to get rid of and separate trash and personal belongings because you've got people that just want to detach themselves from, you know, certain things as far as what they want to keep, what they want to save. But they haven't been here in a year and a half. This is the prime reason why you need the dump on-site because if you don't get rid of it, get it out of sight out of mind, you're going to go through everything, you know, hand-picking everything, everything, everything. I'm like a foot taller. Because you're 6'7", I'm 5'7". So that shows you right the... just how high this is. The bedroom in the back isn't too bad. You're not cleaning. So, I like to see for myself. I got a whole cobweb just going through my eyes growing right now. I got a full cobweb growing right through my eyes. You like zoom in on your eye and there's just like a spider crawling through there. You reading the paper? March 26th, 2016. But she said this has been going on since 2012. What's up? How you feeling? Like my trailer was stolen? Oh, that's not good. I always like this. When the paper chewed up, that's what rats do to make a nest. So all this stuff presents this on, this on, to make a nest. It looks like plywood. It's just going to make me ill. No. It's going to drive me crazy. That's driving me nuts. I'm bringing out my inner gangster. I'm bringing out your inner real real, Marcy. My inner gangster. Look at that. Oh, God. Think more of your inner, like, honest farmer? Then that would be nice. Okay. Okay. On the 40, so can you take the 30? Yeah, that's fine. Bring the 30. Alright, we'll bring you the 30. This is why I bought my own dump trailer, because I hate dealing with dumpster companies, because they're completely unrealized. Completely unrealized. Bring the goddamn dumpster now. Yeah. It's my dumpster, and I need it now. Did you guys hear that? Yeah. I think it's a toy. It hit me again. I want to make sure it's a toy. I heard that. It's not something living. Well, who's laughing now? Look at all these dolls here. This makes you feel really bad for the dogs. And a bird. This reminds me of the times when I used to work on the railroad. That never happened. Whoa. Almost on social security.  Today started out really shitty. So, 7 a.m.,  I went back and reviewed the cameras, and bigger than shit, I saw a guy in a black four-door pickup backing into our property and loading up our trailer, which happens to be the dump trailer that we were going to use for this job here. So, you know, made a police report. They came over here, got started, and I met them here. So, once the dumpster gets here, it'll only take us like 15, 20 minutes to load it. Some of that, that's the stuff that I had packed away. It should still be decent. Okay. I'll pull that out for you. The important thing is, you're getting your life back now.  That's right.  It already is. Writing a check was one of the happiest things that I've been able to do. Good. Turn table, a tape player. Holy cow. Vintage. Very vintage. Curtains I always meant to hang. Cabinet organizers I always meant to use. See, this is new stuff. How you guys feeling? I feel like I need an allergy pill. I feel like a bag of dicks. That's like the second time in a week you've said that. He's consistent. I mean, when you get slapped around with those things, it's going to be bad business. Niko was caressing it and you're complaining about it. Oh man. This is a different breed. I feel like I can't win. In the last, less than six months, I've lost two trailers and one brand new pickup. That was a nice one. And wrecked a $60,000 brand new box truck all due to employee negligence. She's got the loyal best ones here.  Stupidity is extremely expensive. You know that? Very expensive. She ain't talking about us, by the way. You guys are as cheap as they come. Our market value is really increasing. Let's go through the room. You should get stuck in on us. You better. You better. Hot commodity. Sell now. Gonna say this job is not for the week.  Survival of the fittest. If you don't have common sense, just don't do it. Common sense ain't too common. If you can't drive, don't do it.  If you have a drug problem, don't apply here. Or drinking problem. Or if you're addicted to hand sanitizer. That too. Or if you're more worried about what you look like than what you can do on the job, don't apply here. Vanity has no spot here. If you don't know how to bathe every day, do not work here. Yo, that is true.  That's what I'm saying. If you're good at Tetris, you can stack everything into a dumpster perfectly. You can stack your life how you want it, no matter good, bad, whatever. So we should do an interview now. Just give him Tetris. You have literally one minute to get this over. You have a hard time spelling your own name. Yep. We had one girl. I think she lasted two or three days. First day on the job. She was more concerned about getting on fatty long legs than she was working. I mean, can you blame her? And then when he shot her down. Shot her down good.   We had to let her go. We had one guy that collected his toenails in a jar for six years, lived with his mother, picked up dead animals on the street and stored him in his mother's freezer. But like, how do you find that? He admitted it. But how did you find someone like that? He used to work in the funeral industry. How do you spot a blind man at a new beach? It isn't hard. That was good. That was really good. There he is. Did he do that? Don't apply it. So I met this client a couple weeks ago. She finally has reached out and said she needed help. So this house is not very old. I think she said it was maybe 10, 12 years old. You know, she had a tragic, really sad, hard thing happen to her. And that's the way it manifested. It just goes, she went into a deep depression and she just gave up. We all have struggles, but sometimes it manifests in different ways. And unfortunately, it got bad in there. She had several dogs, several birds. And the house got so bad that she literally just walked away from it. She's been staying with someone else for about a year, a year and a half and is finally ready to take her home back. Unfortunately, you know, we discovered a dead bird in there and she said that she thought that she was coming back frequently enough to feed the birds, but apparently not. So the bird starved to death, which, you know, breaks my heart that it was just sitting in there like that. But I think, you know, all the debris and the papers, the rats got in and urinated on it. So it's like really paper mache concrete, just piles and piles of it. So I got here kind of late in the day. You know, I felt like we definitely made a bigger dent. I've only been here for about an hour and a half now and almost all the living room cleaned up. So we're going to be able to help her out. We're going to totally transform the house, deep clean and everything, but it's definitely a big setback. Not having our dumpster here, it's costing us some time. But we were able to at least bag everything and get it ready for the delivery. You know, I think we'll be able to get this job done in a week. See you tomorrow for day two. All right, hey guys. We're back at our level five horde in Bradenton on day two. Oh, my. Good to see you. Mmm, tasty. 2018. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. 17. Oh, my God. That's crazy. Thanks for watching, guys. Don't forget to like, share, subscribe, and ring that bell to be notified of the next episode. For more information, visit any of our locations.


I would like to introduce our speaker tonight. We're very, very privileged to have this Anna Gingrich, who's going to be talking about Chacha Poyas, obviously, enough. And we have a great person to do that for us. Anna's been working in Chacha Poyas since 2010, developing a whole series of lines of research and helping pull this area into a slightly more orderly chronology, understanding all the things that we expect to see within an Andean area. So Anna got her PhD at the University of Chicago in 2014. She's currently a lecturer at Vanderbilt. And from the beginning, especially for her dissertation, worked on monumental domestic architecture in Chacha Poyas, has been dealing a lot with issues of spatial organization in the area, and is also developing chronology, which is quite important. As we all know from however many decades that we've been coming to these meetings, experiencing chronological papers, very important stuff. So, with that, I'd love to welcome Anna to the podium here to give a long anticipated, it's the dessert for the meal time. Anna. So I'm delighted to be here tonight speaking on behalf of Chacha Poyas. It seems like for one I can tell about every 20 years or so the Eastern Andes pop up against the keynote lecture. So I'm excited to be here tonight representing Chacha Poyas. I'm especially excited that there were not one but two Chacha Poyas lectures or talks, so I'm not really sure if that's ever happened at any meeting before, so I'm pleased to be excited. So for those who know me, I'm kind of like a major cheerleader for this area. I think it's one of the most spectacular regions in the Andes, as part of this not so hidden agenda. I'd like to showcase a lot of really just extravagantly beautiful pictures of this area, which I find wonderful, interesting of the Andes. So you'll be seeing a lot of those tonight. I want to preface so rainbows, beautiful flowers, towering walls, etc. We kind of think of when we think of Chacha Poyas. So before I get into that, I just want to point out that not everything is the best and most beautiful. So we have a lot of really ugly ceramics. This is not the main focus of people's attention in this area. So thinking a little bit more seriously, I do have a rationale for focusing on images of landscapes. So given the extraordinary qualities of Andean landscapes, our perceptions and equally important are preconceptions of them. They've played a major role in the history of archaeological interpretation. So tonight I want to focus on these preconceptions and how they've shaped our narratives of the eastern Andes and really the history of study. And I'll be focusing on this from the perspective of my research in central Chacha Poyas. So I want to look at how new research is destabilizing many of these traditionally held preconceptions. And then I also want to look at how new insights that we're gaining help us understand better the relationship between people and landscapes in this area. So kind of looking back to the past and then also moving forward. So the eastern Andes are probably best known for their large expanses of Montaigne Forest, but they're actually one of the most distinctive ecological zones on the planet. So the eastern Andes stretch from Columbia all the way to Argentina. And in addition to this latitudinal variation, they also span a considerable range of altitudes. So they span from more or less 1,500 meters to 4,000 meters above sea level. So even though we tend to, I think, think of them in general as a kind of low-land area or group them with the Amazonia, many of these areas are quite high altitudinally. So the combination of this latitudinal and altitudinal variation, along with very heavy year-round rainfall in many areas, resulted in especially diverse array of microclimates that are piled into very close proximity. So in fact, the northern portion of the eastern Andes actually represent the single most diverse environment on the planet as measured in terms of endemic species. And just kind of throw another statistical figure at you. Even though the eastern Andes only cover about 5%, the land surface of the Amazon basin, they contain as many species as the rest of it combined. So this really is a, it might be only a truly exceptional area. Overall, the eastern Andes have been deeply understudied relative to other parts of the Andes. In part, of course, this is due to the difficulties of working in this environment. But I would argue that it's also due to the assumptions that the conditions that make it difficult for us to work here today also made it difficult for people to comfortably live here in the past. So one way in which the, or one kind of trope that is dominated at the study of the eastern Andes has been the idea of a no man's land. And I think some of the earlier work of our colleague Warren Church has really gotten at this idea in a very productive way. So first, this might be understood in a metaphorical sense as a kind of frontier region between two cultural macro regions. So kind of boundary between the Andes and the Amazon. But also we might understand it as kind of, or also we might look at the history of representation in a more literal sense. So the eastern Andes being a no man's land in the sense that no people were thought to be present here. Or at least very few people, and people who didn't matter significantly or make a major impact on the course of Andean prehistory. So for example, we've known for quite some time about a number of different monumental, monumental remains present here. So quite a lot was done in the 19th century. Also Grand Pahetan might be another example here. So we know that these are present, but for many years these were attributed to societies that came from elsewhere. So Andes or Amazon. So people that developed forms of complexity that they then brought with them to the eastern Andes. We also see some of these tropes in contemporary research in Chajapoyas in particular, where migrationist theories that account for the evolution of complexity still remain major theories in explaining the course of Chajapoyan prehistory. So these would be theories that become less significant in other parts of Andes, but they're still quite influential. Now the environmental factors that researchers have perceived of as discouraging cultural development in this area are numerous. So a number of different factors, these would include soils that are traditionally thought to have been nutritionally deficient, unstable, and prone to erosion. Terrain that is rocky, steep, and broken, and dense vegetation as well. All of these factors expressed in daily life, traveling down roads, we get landslides, floods, and steep terrain. So in fact we actually described several forms of environmental determinism that have been at work in shaping the history of the eastern Andes. So first we might mention a kind of ecological determinism that the eastern Andes have shared with the Amazon basin. So this would be a kind of attribution, a deficiency to tropical forest areas. This is largely changing in lowland South America at this point. It's like we might also mention kind of topographical determinism which would be more commonly shared with other areas of the L.I.P. Highlands. So this perspective sees mountains as places that are generally only settled as a matter of last resort and places that possess limited potential for cultural development. But at the same time factors that might be understood as generally beneficial to the well-being of human societies have also been interpreted as limitations in the sense of thwarting the emergence of politically complex societies in the Andes. So some of these might include regular rainfall that has rendered irrigation systems largely unnecessary and also easy access to a diverse array of closely packed microclimates. Now my judge of point is, in particular, recent research has indeed upheld the conclusion that the state level forms of organization did not develop here autoktonously. But I want to think a little bit beyond this idea of the state tonight. I think we work on diverse approaches to complexity. In particular, empirical and theoretical advances are both demonstrating that nearly every other assumption about the history of human landscape relations should be questioned. So we're in a moment of great change in our interpretations area. So for one thing, it's now clear that not only were humans present in this area from a very early period, so from at least the late Pleistocene, but they're also widely distributed across this area as the early intermedia period. So these are some of my, some of the early intermedia period context, the context that I thought of my own research in central Chajapoyas. But in a number of other areas too, we have very clear evidence that people were present, although we still have a little sense of what actually was taking place at this time. In addition to this, it's also becoming increasingly clear that we can assume that the landscapes that we are familiar with looked the same over the past several millennia. So this also requires us to engage with a different history of people in landscape. So we have the good fortune of a number of recent paleo-environmental studies that have taken place in and around this area. And these have documented a number of episodes of environmental change. So we see this in areas such as forest composition, the major cultivars that people were producing, the intensity of soil erosion, the extent of anthropogenic fire. So if we take a historical ecology approach, we should consider that not only climate change, but also pre-Hispanic inhabitants themselves may be responsible for some of these impacts. So at this point, I want to turn to my own research in Chajapoyas and begin to explore the question of what these landscapes did mean for local inhabitants. So if we set aside topographical preconceptions, what do we actually see in terms of how people did structure space and social practice? And if we set aside ecological preconceptions, what do we see in terms of the landscapes' ability to sustain large and concentrated populations? We see more or less the extent of what is traditionally been understood as Chajapoyas, delimited by the spelling line. So right in the middle here, we see the Atuan Valley, where my research has been concentrated. I want to take a moment to kind of give some context here. I will be speaking tonight for the Atuan Valley in particular. But I don't mean for this research fee or for the presentation to be understood as speaking for all of Chajapoyas. So the area that we traditionally understand as Chajapoyas is a vast area. So if we kind of look at the limits of what we understand as the Inca province, this contains about 30,000 square kilometers. This really is a huge area. So the span is a considerable amount of environmental diversity. But contemporary scholars are also beginning to recognize the great social and political diversity that characterizes this area as well. So for a long time, research focused on the Udkubamba heartland. So following the Udkubamba river that runs north-south through this area. But in recent decades, we're beginning to see a lot of research taking place outside this area. So based on this work, we're starting to see a number of different cultural patterns that suggest that there's a good deal of cultural, potentially ethnic, and probably political diversity too.  From the ethnic historic records, we know of a number of groups of different names, such as the Chilchos and the Chiyaos. But archaeological evidence at this point is starting to basically confirm what we had suspected for a while. So along with a number of other scholars, I think a lot of contemporary researchers are starting to question the utility of the term Chilchos, and put this all together, at least prior to the income period. So I'll just take a moment to point out that we have not come in volume with foreign church and myself on precisely this question. I'll look for that coming out soon. Okay, so now that I've pointed out that we have this great diversity, I actually do work in this kind of heartland region. So the Antoine Valley is actually one of the better known areas of Chachapoyas. This is primarily due to the significant influence of Angus Scholarup's work here in the 1980s and the 1990s. So a number of you may be familiar with this particularly very robust volume. Her work focused in particular on the inter-provincial capital of Cochabamba. You can see here some of the Cusco style masonry. But even despite the depth of her work here, it really only scratched the surface of local history. So on the one hand, it focused primarily on the income period, but on the other hand, this is just such an incredibly rich area to be studying. So in light of this, my own work here since 2010 has focused on elucidating basic aspects of social and spatial organization at the site cluster of Tambio. And this would be really one of the major concentrations of archeological remains in the Antoine Valley. So I want to start by just providing an overview of some of the major cultural and environmental features of Tambio, which I argue even just describing these can give us quite a bit of insight into human landscape relations. So Tambio consists of a cluster of residential sites, mortuary sites, and agricultural infrastructure that's located at the confluence of the Tambio and the Antoine rivers. So most of these sites are located at an altitude of between 3,300 and 3,500 meters above sea level. Again, I would emphasize that this is actually a fairly high altitude area. So the Tambio landscape is rugged. It consists of a number of steep landforms that are broken apart by deep canyons about half a kilometer. So presently it includes areas of high altitude grassland, so the local term here would be holka. Also stands of montane forest. I'm going to get a sense of these here. But also, people will have access to quichua areas of lower altitudes within about half of this walk or so from here. So it's actually a good example of kind of a landscape naturally suited to vertical archipelago kinds of pursuits. And earlier today, we're in Discuss at some length. Stephen Fresh's work in the Uchimarca area. This is only located about 30 kilometers south of here. So definitely a similar landscape. So over the course of our survey in this area, we've documented 12 residential sites, which all directly overlook the quichua and the Tambio rivers. So there's a good deal of variation in the size of these areas. The log network concentrates on the significance of this. So the sites range in size from less than half a hectare to over seven hectares. And without exception, they're all located on mountain peaks or on ridges. So traveling between these sites can take, depending on the sites that you're moving between, it can take several hours or half a day. It's difficult to rank across. But as far as the crow flies, they're actually spaced very close to each other. So people potentially could have communicated between many of them, say via smoke signals or even whistling. And people nowadays as they move through the landscape do tend to whistle long distance sometimes. So the question of why people chose to set all these relatively inaccessible mountain peaks has provoked considerable discussion in chatapoyas as in many other parts of the LIP highlands. So in a lot of areas such as the western Titicaca basin, this pattern seems very likely to have been motivated by defense. And we clearly see this in a number of features. So things like concentric perimeter walls, parapets, sashes of sling stones, or other weapons. But in chatapoyas, defensive concerns are not reflected in built environments by and large. So perimeter walls have only been documented at a tiny minority of sites. None of the sites that directly overlooked the confluence of these two rivers here have not... Sorry, so we have not identified perimeter walls at any of the sites that directly overlooked this area. And in its context, I think it's important that we consider other factors in explaining settlement patterning. So in this case, I would argue that it seems more likely to have responded to the unique attributes of this local landscape. So for one thing, by placing villages on mountain peaks, people would have avoided the deep shadows that characterize many of these canyon areas. So they would have maximized daylight for both their villages and for their fields. So I think this image here pretty well conveys that kind of sense as you reach the late afternoon. People also would have enhanced visibility and communication. So once you get down in the canyons, it's difficult to see between areas. And also landslides are common concern in this area, especially during the rainy season. So by placing your village up above the landslide, you would have had a functional use. But beyond this, the distribution of other kinds of ritual and economic infrastructure takes to an intimate familiarity with the affordances of the landscape. So for example, Tamiya has a considerable number of mortuary sites, which seem to indicate a kind of conceptual affinity with natural rock. And in this case, this largely tends to be limestone. So the most impressive of these sites are two really extensive necropolis. It's the site of La Petaca and Diablo Vasi. So these are located several hundred meters above the ground surface and a cliff face. They both consist, sorry, La Petaca consists of several hundred burial structures, so masonry chulpas, also natural caves in which people were placed, and many of these are associated with red ochre petroglyphs, too. So La Petaca actually represents the single largest cliff tomb necropolis in Chajapoyas, even though it has been very heavily almost entirely looted. So recently, Marla Toyn has worked at La Petaca and acquired a number of dates. We have some sense of when this was used. Her earliest dates are around 1,000 CE. And it's been up to the Inca and possibly even the colonial period. Outside of these two sites, however, the majority of tombs actually consist of more formal kinds of structures, even kind of natural settings. So they largely make up corporate murals that are placed under the many rock outcrops that occur naturally throughout this landscape. Some of them also take the form of masonry structures sealing off natural caves and also some of them form freestanding masonry chulpas. So I think some of these are probably less known outside of Chajapoyas. Beyond tombeo, we see other kinds of expressions of this relationship between living rock and spaces of the dead. So one of the interesting practices that we see in Chajapoyas are often groups of burials in natural cave systems. And this practice has pretty much... it's been very little published, but it's pretty common and definitely an interesting area for future research. So in addition to mortuary spaces, really impressive swaths of the tombeo lake state were also refashioned into agricultural terraces. Most of the land service in this area is made up of slopes that are at least 30 degrees, so terraces enabled residents to take advantage of terrain that would otherwise have been economically unproductive. So recently using drone photography and pedestrian survey, we have identified over 580 hectares of relic bench terraces. And we've also documented further 340 hectares of broad-field terraces. Many of these continue and used by current farmers, but we can presume that many of them are probably pre-Columbian in origin. We have yet to identify any canals associated with these systems, which is not necessarily surprising given the heavy rainfall in this area for much of the year. And in fact, one of the major functions in terracing of this landscape, something that we are currently evaluating in our research, is whether they serve primarily to facilitate drainage. So trying to prevent the problem so currently we're looking at this by building DEMs of the landscape using our drone imagery and using ArcGIS hydrology tools to look at this. And one of the most distinctive forms of local agricultural infrastructure is the terrorist sinkhole. So this is very roughly analogous in form to the, I don't know, Anka site of Mariah in the Cusco area. These were formed naturally through the collapse of sinkholes in the carcid landscape, which were then modified artificially. So Anka Schiller at first published some of these and she posited that they could serve for drainage, but this has not actually been evaluated yet, so we'll be looking at this in upcoming field seasons. Now, modeling the articulation of all of these features is going to require a far better understanding of chronology than we present now. So this is a point where I want to point out that a lot of these interpretations are necessarily provisional. It's a very complex area, both in terms of the total number of sites and also the diverse kinds of mortuary agricultural habitational sites we see going on here. And these difficulties are further compounded by a number of different factors. So it's virtually impossible to use a pedestrian survey to establish chronological data in this area. For one thing, when we get into actual sites or habitational sites, the density of vegetation makes ground survey virtually impossible. So that's an issue to start with. And second, above and beyond that, we still don't have fine-grained ceramic chronologies for this area that would make that possible even if we could see the ground surface. So as a result of that, our chronological insights rely at this point primarily on radiocarbon dates. So Marla Twain's work at La Quixota produced a set of four dates at this point. And we also have a set of 18 dates from the habitational site in Montevideo with my dissertation work. So what we can tell at this point is that some probably a limited population was already present here as early as 200 BCE. So we have a few dates. These are from limited context, so we don't have a great understanding of what was going on here. The first signs of the kinds of cultural practices that we would traditionally associate with Chautupoyas culture appear around, slightly before 1,000 CE, particular stone architecture. But it's really only around 1,200 to 1,250 BCE evidence of a very large population that was spread out through an extensive area. So people were present here for several hundred years, and then the Inca Compas seems to have taken place around 1,450 to 1,470. So at a number of different sites we have found artifacts and architecture that are cyclistically Inca. And again, this is a preliminary conclusion, but there seems to be some evidence for the reorganization of the population under Indian control. So initially at Montevideo we found signs of abandonment at this point. We should find very few ink artifacts in Montevideo, so it seems like the population may have been moved out. But our recent work at the site of Kuchacunga suggests that this site may have actually been built at a later date and only briefly occupied. Some sites may have been depopulated while others were settled at this time. So the Inca were present in this area for a while, and then we've also found some evidence of colonial occupations. So recently we found Nueva Cadi's last beads and Lanachini's last, so dating from the first half of the 16th century. So what we can say overall is we have a very lengthy history of occupation in this area, but a lot remains to be understood. So from this initial overview, several conclusions become clear. The first point would be that substantial populations were present in this area for quite a while, including well before the traditional 1000 CE date that we generally associate with the coalescence of Kuchacunga culture. The second major takeaway point would be that the local environment clearly did not pose an insurmountable obstacle to the people who lived here. To the contrary, all evidence suggests that it was recognized as a materially and conceptually rich resource. And in fact, to be a scale and the wanting mentality of its built environments, initially in my categorization of this area was home to some kind of complex system during the late pre-Inca period, even despite the lack of evidence for state-level fundamental organization. So at this point, I want to bring in some of our more specific archaeological or architectural mapping and excavation data from the past seven years and consider what exactly was the nature of complexity at home to you. So if this wasn't a state society, then what was it? Probably the most definitive characteristic of this site complex is the manner in which it's fragmented topography of this space. Although the population size and the density of the settlement cluster would easily qualify as urban, at least by the standards of the pre-Columbian andes, pre-K-Atomio was definitely non-urban in its organization, at least if we understand traditional models of urban. So for one thing, rather than clustering in a single extensive area, the population was divided into discrete communities separated by these deep canyons which would probably have set limits on the ease and the frequency of interaction. So presumably this would have encouraged the formation of distinct community identities among these separate villages who regularly interacted among themselves on a more regular basis.  Now one of our original research presence was whether Tombio did in fact represent an integrated settlement system rather than just a series of discrete, largely autonomous smaller villages. So do we actually see this as one thing or as a series of separate smaller communities? Now in an area of economic integration we really don't know yet so this will be one of the big questions to be addressed. But our studies of architecture in the built environment do suggest that these villages form a single socially integrated system. And this is best seen to the lens of domestic architecture. In particular I would suggest that we can see how domestic architecture reflects status and in this regard we're fortunate to have a truly exceptional level of preservation at many of these sites. This results from the combination of remote location so there's very few populations out in this area at the present time. But also that the presence of dense forests which make our lives complicated as we do research but which also create an extraordinary level of preservation. These buildings that you see here are very large but they're not at all exceptional in their level of conservation. We have hundreds of site hundreds of buildings with this kind of level of conservation here. So in a number of places elsewhere I've argued that we can interpret masonry differences as a basic proxy of social status. So the basic idea here is that in order to create finer masonry this requires a greater input of labor. So we can read this as kind of social capital where households who could count on the support of more extensive kin networks or ritual relationships or just the participation of greater amounts of neighbors wouldn't be able to build bigger and finer houses with higher quality masonry. So very roughly we can sort out four kinds of categories of masonry ranging from almost brick-like coarse masonry all the way down to more irregular, basically unworked masonry. There's kind of two points here in understanding social integration. So the first is that all of the discrete villages of Tambio we see the whole gamut so all these different kinds of masonry represented. So I would argue that there are significant differences in social status within each individual community. But at the same time when we look across communities there's considerable variation in the proportions of masonry at each site. So on the one hand at a site like Kuchakonga the one that was probably built later on only about 18% of preserved buildings have this kind of fine brick-like masonry where at a site like La Jolla 94% of buildings have this kind of masonry. So I would suggest that we can see this as evidence of the differences in status not only characterized each village internally but also characterized relationships between sites as well. And beyond this a number of attributes of the built environment also suggest some degree of centralization or to be a little bit more precise I would say that they might suggest differences in the concentration of power across communities. This is especially evident at the site of La Jolla which I'm going to argue probably exercise a dominant role in power relations at Tongia. So I just mentioned the very high proportion of high status masonry here. Beyond this La Jolla is the only site associated with architecture that is monumental in scale relative to houses. So I say relative to houses as a qualifier I'll come back to this in just a moment. But unequivocally we have quite monumental architecture here. In addition to these factors La Jolla is also centrally located. It overlooks the confluence of the Tongia rivers. And beyond this it's the largest site so it we've recorded over 400 circular structures at this site so presumably houses. So in terms of both number of structures and area is roughly comparable to the better known site in La Jolla. But despite the evidence for urban like differences in terms of the concentration of power across settlements Tongia definitely does not adhere to traditional expectations of urban space organization. So for one thing settlement layouts are not characterized by significant architectural diversity which we would expect at urban configuration. And in this we can also say we do see this in other kinds of cities in the Andes but we don't see this here. So instead of the built environments of sites are actually quite similar. We might almost say repetitive. So they consist of the majority of circular presumably residential structures and we only see a handful of special purpose probably ceremonial structures but we're in most cases similar in scale to houses. Beyond this we have not identified any of the kind of buildings that we might expect to be associated with the centralized administrative apparatus. So for example we have not identified any kind of non-domestic storage structures. We also have not identified any kind of formalized housing movement to the site of just roads. And really in fact perhaps the most striking aspect of these built environments is the absence of any kind of central public spaces. So this would traditionally be a feature that archaeologists would see as completely necessary for populations of this scale. So none of the sites is organized around any kind of central core as civic or ceremonial buildings. And we only see two sites that have any kind of walled, plaza-like spaces. Both of these are fairly small in area and might really be understood better as a large patio or kind of a plus-waila type building structure. These are actually both associated with high-status neighborhoods. So they really don't seem to be public in the sense we ordinarily think of. Here's where I get to the domestic volatility part. At the same time the built environments are actually characterized by a very strong emphasis on domestic architecture. So I can go on quite a bit at a greater length, elaborating on this. But to give it short, houses were very complex both technically in terms of their construction in difficult terrains. Also aesthetically, they're incredibly rich in a number of decorative features. And they're also very large structures. So at Tanbio the average house size is about five meters in diameter. So if we calculate this based on the specific gravity of limestone, we can assume that the average size house required about 30 tons of limestone just for the upper portion. So not even including the base. And if we use the kind of traditional roof model that a number of people are the most scholars today here to, this comes to a total of over seven meters in height. So really by most definitions the term houses would qualify as monumental architecture. But an especially interesting twist on this, we see this not only in high status houses but also in houses with features that by other kinds and attributes would qualify as lower status. So for example here this would be a house associated with higher status masonry. So we're going through one debuto. This one has one of the lower ranked grades in masonry. This one is actually similar in height. So we've used the dimensions, the base on this one is about four meters high. So in fact I would say that houses in general really seem to have been the main architectural site in which the power relations display and labor are concentrated. Where we don't see this as in the kind of structures we would traditionally understand as public architecture. So we don't see a lot of evidence for large gatherings in dedicated central spaces. We don't see the co-option of monumentality by a restricted segment of the population. So to come back to the question of landscape, to what extent was this distinct from the architecture of the building? So we don't see a lot of evidence for large gatherings in dedicated central spaces. To what extent was this distinctive kind of organization directly attributable to the steep and broken landscape of Tokyo? So I think it would be fool Herney to say that this didn't play some kind of role. So many of the sites or virtually all of the sites here are located on areas that are very steep with limited open and flat space. So undoubtedly this would be a good example of our experimentation with how to express social relations through the built environment. But on the other hand, I would not suggest that the landscape was an absolute determinant here. So a good counter example in this regard is the maze atop of Taho Pampa, which is located at the right in the center of the Tampio area. So this area was quite central and it really consists of the only extensive flat space in this area. But the only archaeological remains here are those of Atopo. So I think of course it would be difficult to imagine that people never gathered here in large groups. But what I would see as more significant is that these kind of structures were formalized through the creation of dedicated architecture met specifically in public gatherings. So up to this point I've covered a lot of the architectural data that reflects my dissertation research as well as some of my ongoing research. But I think it's important to look beyond the bounds of the built environment and look at the broader landscape relationships outside villages per se. So this is more the direction of where I'm going at the present. So I want to take a little time to think about some of the implications of these kinds of political organizations. So as we build a more detailed picture of what complexity meant at Tampio, it'll be important to also consider how power relations ordered the use of the broader. So I'm going to come back to the question of terraces. So really the scale of construction at Tampio is staggering. So 15% of the land surface in this greater area is covered by terraces. Not only numerous in total extent, but also in terms of the proportion of the land state. Now undoubtedly some of these were either built or expanded under Inca control. But even in spite of that I think it's pretty safe to assume that a significant amount of infrastructure was in place during the Lake Intermedia period. So this is indicated on the one hand by the overall scale settlement in this area. We also see this confirmed in the dietary data from our domestic assemblages at Montevuto. So during this work we confirmed that diets from the LIP consist primarily of high altitude products. So items that were probably produced in this particular area rather than being brought in from the floor. This included cultivars such as potatoes and quiche. We also found a number of examples of juveniles in our final assemblage. So this seems to suggest that herds were being raised locally as well. Potentially in the higher altitude shoulder areas. So in the context of Tampio's heavily fragmented landscape it's going to be important in the future questions such as whether terraced fields and the products of local agriculture were equally or unequally distributed among communities. In addition, we'll want to look at how the absence of irrigation systems impacted the creation and the use of terraced fields. So obviously questions of labor organization and more scale agro-hydraulic infrastructure have been a subject of great debate in the Andes as well. Contributed in a substantive way to this debate as we look further in this area. A second factor to consider in looking at Cuban landscape relations here is demography and the issue of the long-term or you might say sustainable use of shared resources. So at the present Tampio is home to a maximum of 300 people. Both of them live permanently in the nearby town of Namba and come up here on occasion to maintain their herbs and their fields. During our survey though we counted a total of 1400 circular structures in the archeological sites of the immediate Tampio area. So if we kind of assume a rough estimate of 5 to 7 people per building this generates a maximum pre-explaned population estimate of somewhere in order of 7 to 10,000. So even if we assume a very conservative estimate of around 6,000 people we still end up with a population that was somewhere on the order of 20 times higher than that of the present. So this population was clustered in a landscape that is today perceived as somewhat manageable or marginal depending on whose opinion this goes with. So this would seem to apply that either pre-Hispanic land use of this magnitude contributed severely to environmental degradation or that mechanisms were in place to promote sustainable practices for this number of people. This question is particularly germane to the issue of deforestation. So generally this is perceived as a modern phenomenon that resulted from the incorporation of this area into national and global economies. Today the landscape is largely deforested but looking at these kinds of population estimates we might assume that already in the pre-Hispanic period the local population was placing considerable demands on forest health. So for example to come back to this model of the typical kind of Chuchapoya house and Chuchapoya roof this model posits that the roof would have required 25 beams for its construction. To multiply this times 1,400 buildings this comes to a total 35,000 trees that had to be felled to roof the entire settlement cluster just one time over. And obviously roofs are perishable so we can assume that that's kind of a lowball estimate. So we're talking a very large number of trees here. So how the population ensured the long-term availability of forest resources and how they balance this with the land use requirements of agriculture and pasture remain open questions to be considered. So one possibility here is the communities practice some kind of forest management which Alex Chuchapoya and his colleagues have argued in the case of the income. Certainly forest management is something that we see widely throughout the Amazon as well. But at a broader level I think it's important that we also emphasize that the local ecosystems wouldn't remain over time. So I think this should underlie many of our interpretations or many of our grand questions as we go forward. The contemporary landscapes that we take as an interpretive baseline they're very different from those that people experienced or created in the past. This is certainly not just due to changes of landscape during the modern period or even the colonial era. Pre-Pollonian populations too would have dramatically reshaped the landscape. Certainly to the same extent if not even more so. And I would also say that it's important to recognize that these changes were not just a matter of adaptation to the cloud forest environment. So instead they were the product of specific cultural practices in particular socio-political orders. So in this talk I focused mainly on the late intermediate period but as our research moves forward and we gain a better sense of chronology it will be important to understand how successive groups from the LIP to the Inca to the Spanish reorder this landscape to suit their own needs and their own agendas. So to sum up what might we take away from this discussion of the specific context of tabio and how might we use this to start thinking about broader histories of people on landscape from the eastern Andes. So I would argue that above all future research needs to immediately discard the idea that these landscapes and especially montane forests were somehow inherently more limiting than other Andean landscapes. So we all work in areas with their own challenges. There's nothing that specifically sets the eastern Andes apart as inherently more difficult. For its pre-Hispanic inhabitants tabio was neither an impenetrable jungle nor a precarious Eda and endangered destruction of the hands of development. Instead it was a deeply evocative and physically rich landscape that both allowed and necessitated the development of unique forms of social practice. So I'd say there's a couple of correlates here that might take away. The first thing here would be the focusing on the limitations of eastern Andean landscapes has historically discouraged the study of this region and deprived Andean archaeology more broadly at the insides of this region as to offer. In addition to this it inaccurately represents the eastern Andes as a kind of timeless wilderness outside the scope of anthropogenic changes. Not only is this inaccurate but it also denies agency to the populations who did inhabit this area. But most importantly a focus on the limitations of these environments closes off the possibility of discerning otherness and actually being surprised by context that can push our world building up its forward. So in conclusion Chajikwais has certainly had more than its share of spectacular archaeological discoveries in recent decades. Hopefully a few here in my list. What I would say is most impressive are the unexpected ways that people crafted their worlds in places that were long assumed to lie at the level of human habitability by thinking the institutions of the many individuals and groups who have made this work possible over the years. And I'll be here with yet another beautiful image of this area. So thank you very much. Thank you. This is enormous. This is the sense of the vista, the visibility of the landscape that is forming a choice to build in such a certain way. It's more of your sense of purpose choices. There's a lot of factors that combined to contribute to house form more generally obviously but specifically to the height of buildings. So the best preserved houses, the kind of upper structure walls are around two meters or so. And again I would stress that this is for this local area so other areas of Chajikwais have different kinds of house floors. So upper walls tend to be around two meters. The upper portion. So this reconstruction is largely based on an experimental model by Morgan Davis which is based on the last documented extent house in the 19th century I believe So that's where specifically the very sharply angled roof model came from. That adds to several more meters but then the base is an interesting question. So not all of the houses have these platform basins. Some of them seem to be adaptational or have had a functional aspect and allow people to build under these steep slopes. So for instance the building that I showed with a four meter high base that's an extremely steep slope that's even difficult to walk on. Because that kind of function would have been fulfilled by larger platforms that a number of buildings could be placed on. So in some cases those do seem to respond to an architectural necessity but in other cases they seem to be a reflection of status. So I'd say it's a very case specific kind of example. We might take that as illustrated of the fact that also kind of responding most specifically to your question too. In this area the building's almost always space outward so out to the landscape and dense slope. I think there could be a lot of explanations for that. Were there teams fitting the house floors at these sites and was that part of the base construction? Yeah, that's a great question. So in most areas of Chajapoyas that have been studied so far that's the case. There's quite a lot of barriers on the house floors. This is actually not the case in this local Chuan area. Which is surprising and original. In this case I think this might be related to the fact that bedrock occurs very close to the surface. So it would have been very labor intensive to bury people into the earth. Thanks that was fun. Alright, I'm glad you brought up the bedrock. I hadn't really thought much about cave stressing forest in terms of the amount of wood needed for construction of all of these buildings. And one thing that is seen in the paleo-ecological records that have been completed in the high areas are almost a conversion at a certain point after say 800 or 900 to all this maybe cultivation literally. Just like Alex Chepstow must be talking about in the Cusco area it may be going on say in the Poma Coches in northern part of what we call Chajapoyas is a big it's a really great big open expanse around a lake and it seems like it went from maze to all this fairly quickly and then it was all all this all the time and to the point where it just seemed like it was a very intentional thing they were doing and I think that still they love all this up there it grows quickly, it's straight it's the eucalyptus the pre-Columbian eucalyptus so it makes a whole lot of sense if you have this high demand to actually be promoting the cultivation of all this in these places and a good explanation for why it's showing up in these places where paleo-ecologists have been working and I don't think they've even really thought in terms of what you've just been saying statistically what that would mean anyway, that's really interesting yeah I confirm that and it will be really interesting as we seem to explore in the paleo-environmental from the animal from archaeological frontier to the sepula and the forest and also in different areas too great talk really great talk questions for you and everybody be honest I'm just going to take it off but what is what does long distance exchange look like during the L.I.P maybe from the West so speaking to what does long distance exchange look like in these communities so speaking to our excavation who's next from this particular area we've found a couple sherds from from those early contacts around 200 BC due to the best of our knowledge that are very small potentially Kahama but really it's a bit difficult to tell we definitely in the earlier context we find clays that have a high quantity of kaolin so that seems to be indicating different kinds of interactions I can't speak a whole lot from this particular context to the ceramic indices of long distance exchange in terms of the tannacles we see different elements from different distances but very small proportions overall so we have things like beans and maize and quinoa that would have been more for these species for example really just I think two elements that probably came from real lowland areas to the east so there is small evidence for the fact that there was this very hard distance exchange but as to who was doing it what proportion of the population was doing it I think I think we'll be able to say more just to small things just to small things yeah she's had this kind of dispassionality of the lowland area and she says that there's any kind of a career trying to plan for the lowland or even just to create and then they all thought there would be messages between the structures like how do people move between them and you know we're working in the areas where life is in their death side so are there spaces around the outsides of these structures so I think we'll use some ideas but I'm just curious about yeah these are questions that I looked at in my work at this point the first question was on centralized planning no there's no real evidence for centralized planning I'd be quick to add though that doesn't mean no planning so I would say like planning this centralized between neighbors obviously to build a house of this size you couldn't just kind of build this and then find out after the fact that that was an issue there's probably formalized and ad hoc kinds of negotiations that went on for now and really interesting aspects of these built environments is the lack of developed outdoor space so houses are very close to that for the most part but also even with insight these are really steep this really steep terrain so there are really not a lot of patios to speak of so I think probably there are not a lot of activities going on in outdoor areas this would obviously have implications for kinds of informal domestic practices so I would suspect that these more often took place indoors in this context in other areas the LIP Highlands was somewhere as a telegraph organization I think you guys got movement too so there are not formal or stone paths to the sites an analogy that people bring up off that are Tygrona sites there's nothing like that that movement was ad hoc that there were probably very minimal kinds of routes of movement that people took to the sites at different times so in general buildings are very close to that so there's more of an emphasis on interior space than on exterior space probably anxious to start speaking before but the status issue with the basin is there anything else that correlates with that because just looking at thinking about the practices involved with that basin rate in the sense of how different that would be in terms of time investment and I guess it's the corollary are there other things you're seeing internally in spaces in terms of alignments in terms of journey also in honor yeah so I would be hesitant to just make a direct equation between masonry labor infant and masonry status and breaking the directional way statistically there's a number of other factors going on here so higher quality masonry correlates with larger interior areas also with the presence of special purpose features like freezes in particular also buildings with finer masonry tend to sort of to site centered well at least I wanted you to have their cluster around the site center so they're located into areas with other kinds of special purpose features so all together these lines of evidence I would suggest speak to greater social capital or symbolic capital of the people who are living in these houses or at least building these houses is it possible to think about that in terms of expertise in craft production at masonry at craft production and this being kind of a demonstration of that skill in production yeah well I guess that would hinge on the question of whether the house residents were the artisans too I don't like I've speculated on this I don't have a lot of answers I would think it would be quite like given the technical specialization of things like these roofs so another point would be that these are not we have never found evidence of the center post to support the roofs in the pre-anked area so we're not really sure how they built these roofs even at this point I did probably have fairly complex engineering looking at analogies say with vernacular architecture in West Africa and some of the construction techniques I think would be very possible that there were art and master architects or craft persons who either possess these technical construction skills or also creates these more specialized features like presets so yeah that would be a complex answers to whether those were actual builders of the houses or perhaps whether builders had special access to these specialized artisans too but I see that as a kind of measure of status their pressure I was wondering if you could say something about water management I remember I visited 10 years ago or so and one of the homerooms that was expressed then was that they thought people had to go down to get the water so if you cut off the access it was not going to work out there it just wouldn't even sound storage or anything like that yeah this is a question that I think people thought more about in the past and it's not been resolved but I would say there's been less attention to it I can't I'm not aware of any features within villages themselves but sort of infrastructure features were designed to address water supplies and one thing in that area would be that some scholars postulated that roof construction was designed to shed water and keep it away from the base and the foundations of buildings so within preservation of the house itself it was designed for that it has to moving water throughout the site I would say we don't see any evidence for that at this point thank you I thank Anna for a very thoughtful and fun-provoking talk I feel like I know a corner of Chatchapua is much better at this point that last major event for this meeting will be the Resonance Reception in the Archeological Research Facility just a few steps away