Ancient Andean Compartmentalised Boards in Perspective: Games and Social Organisation in the Pre-Columbian Andes

Tacconi, Samuele (2026) Ancient Andean Compartmentalised Boards in Perspective: Games and Social Organisation in the Pre-Columbian Andes. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates a little-understood class of Andean artefacts known as maquetas, yupanas, and/or taptanas/tableros. These enigmatic objects are compartmentalised boards whose function is still uncertain. Often studied in isolation or appropriated to support external arguments, they are here studied as part of a wide assemblage, analysing the largest database of known examples to date. This research recontextualises these boards as a coherent corpus, situating them within their cultural, chronological, and geographical frameworks.

Through typological, iconographic, and contextual analyses, the study proposes that some board Types – particularly those defined here as Types 1, 2 and 3, and possibly Type-6 – functioned as gameboards. Their formal and symbolic characteristics align closely with the social and ritual roles of games in ancient Andean societies. The boards’ layouts and imagery evoke an idealised microcosm of the Andean world, articulated through principles of duality, complementarity, and mediation – key structural logics of Andean cosmology and social organisation.

These findings link the boards to broader transformations in the Peruvian highlands during the Early Intermediate Period and Middle Horizon, involving exchanges between Recuay and Wari, and the large-scale interaction networks of the Middle Horizon, encompassing the north coast of Peru and the southern Ecuadorian highlands. Games, in this context, may have served as ritualised arenas, mediating relations among emergent corporate groups in a segmentary social landscape. By reframing these artefacts as active instruments of social and cosmological mediation, embedded within broader social processes, this research highlights the significance of play as an analytical category in Andean archaeology. It argues that gaming as ritual performance was not a peripheral amusement but a central integrative mechanism in the ritualised economies of ancient Andean societies, fostering cooperation within diverse, ecologically and politically complex societies.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of History
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	16 Mar 2026 14:06
Last Modified:	16 Mar 2026 14:06
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/102351
DOI:

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