Print this pagePukara Project Summary
Welcome to the web page of Elizabeth Klarich, the Director of the Pukara Archaeological Project and the Assistant Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology @ UCLA. Pukara, located in the northwestern Lake Titicaca Basin of highland Peru (Department of Puno), was the first population center to develop in this region during the Late Formative Period (200 BC- AD 200). There were archaeological projects at Pukara in the last century (1939, 1964, mid-1970s), but due to political unrest field research ceased in the northern Titicaca Basin from the early-1980s through the mid-1990s. In 1998, the Pukara Domestic Archaeology Project began as an extended site visit and was followed by a geophysical survey (2000), excavations (2001), and analysis (2002) that served as the basis for Elizabeth Klarich's Ph.D. dissertation (2005). In 2006, fieldwork continued at the site with a mobile GIS mapping project directed at determining potential areas for the next phase of excavations. Today, the Pukara Archaeological Project is a multi-year effort directed towards unraveling issues related to urbanism, uses of monumental space, early leadership strategies, and the institutionalization of inequality in complex societies.
Pukara has a long occupational history, complex architecture and site organization, and covers a vast area (at least 1km2); we look forward to many years of fieldwork and artifact analysis to help us begin to understand the founding, utilization, and decline of this key site within local and regional contexts. This work has been generously funded through NSF, Fulbright Hays, University of California-Santa Barbara, the Heinz Foundation, and also supported by the INC-Peru. Please don't hesitate to contact us with questions and/or comments about the website and project. Also, see us featured on NPR Radio Expeditions' "Lost Temples of Peru" (Part 4, 2001)!