• Investigates how the issue of power is approached by scholars of the South American Andes
• Represent a wide range of regional, temporal, methodological, and theoretical perspectives on the prehispanic Andes from the Preceramic Period (representing the earliest sedentary societies) through the Late Horizon (the expansionary phase of the Inca Empire)
• Brings together an array of approaches-both theoretical and methodological--as they are currently being employed by archaeologists in the Andes
• Enriches the study of the emergence of complex societies, the origins of the state, and dynamics of sociopolitical organization in well-known societies like the Chav´ýn, Nasca, Wari, Tiwanaku, and Inca and in less-well-known groups, such as the pre- and post-Tiwanaku societies of the altiplano and the Late Intermediate Period groups of the south coast of Peru

Dennis Ogburn is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is an anthropologist specializing in the archaeology of the New World. His primary research is concentrated in Andean South America, where he has conducted field work mainly in Ecuador, but also in Peru. Main interests include understanding the processes of expansion and maintenance of the Inco Empire and other conquest states in the New World and combining advanced scientific techniques (geochemical sourcing and GIS) with analysis of historical materials (ethnohistory).

Christina A. Conlee is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Texas State University. Her research areas include Archaeology of the Andean area of South America, collapse of complex societies, social transformations, and ceramic analysis. Her research is currently focused in the Nasca region on the south coast of Peru.