This study reflects on—to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes—the apparently nasty, brutish and short lives of people in a post-imperial collapse scenario. In this case, the relevant canvas is the Andes, and the people are the inhabitants of the highland region of Andahuaylas. This book covers how communities in the area negotiated the collapse of the Wari Empire (AD 700–1000) during the subsequent early Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1450). With Tainter's (Reference Tainter1988) seminal book on societal collapse as the ever present backdrop, Kurin employs a strong focus on scientific method to elucidate on social theory involving community, migration, ethnic and social identity, violence, health and diet, and medical innovations.

Based on a detailed study of 477 individuals from four main sites, the author sets out to explain the underpinnings of Chanka and Quichua society in the first 250 years after the retreat of the Wari Empire. The latter ruled a large swathe of land across the Central Andes from its capital, Huari (Schreiber Reference Schreiber1992); the Chanka and Quichua were the successor polities. Eschewing the ambiguous veracity of the sixteenth-century ethnohistoric records on the Chanka and Quichua, this volume opts for osteological, archaeological and bio-geochemical methods to tease out a narrative of life after imperial collapse. It is apparent that there are some continuities from the earlier Wari period, but it is the differences that shine through. Compared to the idyllic certainties of the empire, the later Chanka and Quichua lived a fractured and fraught existence, in which the stronger Chanka dominated and isolated the weaker Quichua communities.

Often counterintuitive, sometimes seemingly deliberately so, this volume seeks to contradict accepted dogma, such as the siting of strategic hill-top settlements to facilitate access to, and intensification of, an agro-pastoralist economy, positing that it is the ubiquitous violence of the times that often conditioned site location and function. In this, the author is following, from a bioarchaeological angle, recent scholarship on the pre-eminence of violence during the Andean Late Intermediate Period (Arkush Reference Arkush2011). Indeed, the book is replete with conflict, and describes a society under severe stress. Using modern analogies, the author states that we are witnessing the effects of a ‘failed’ state. Osteological, isotope and chemical analysis of the individuals paints a picture familiar from present-day civil wars, with violent death accounting for 7 per cent of fatalities and a staggering 34.4 per cent of the human remains showing some sign of malnutrition.

In contrast to the early Inca ‘bogeyman’ of a unified Chanka confederation, the communities described here come across as small, caste-ridden, divided and insular. In turn, the well-presented evidence documents that men ate better than women and suggests that the limited amount of in-migration might have been due to female abduction during raids, as well the ethnocide of men, women and children. Indeed, the book is an indictment on the vicious and violent nature of Chanka (and by association Quichua) society, a polity which was to meet its end at the hands of their enemies: the Inca.

Yet, for all the data, brazen exposition and fractious hyperbole, there is a feeling that Kurin's narrative is oddly one-sided. Not only are the Quichua strangely absent from most of the book, but some of the brash statements are based on relatively limited evidence. For instance, 60 per cent of the Quichua skulls have head trauma—but in effect this means 9 out of 15 skulls. These figures would seem to suggest that the sample size is too low to be statistically significant. The same happens with the case made for female abduction, which is based on only two individuals. All these and others build a picture in which some of the wider assertions have to be taken with a pinch of salt. While the evidence does point in the direction that the author is taking us, it is not conclusive. Overstatement can weaken the case being made.

To give one example, the division of Chanka society into an elite (Piwi Churi) and an underclass (Wakcha) on the basis of the cranial modification of the latter, is not fully supported by the available data, yet much exposition is based on this assumption. Granted the Watcha suffer more head trauma, and seem to have a worse diet (although the number of individuals sampled is low), but nevertheless, they are still buried within the machay tombs, and therefore feted as some type of elite. This suggests possible alternative interpretations, such as that of a warrior-class within a given ayllu-based organisation.

Part of the problem with the book arises from the fact that this is taken directly from a doctoral thesis, where bold statements and sweeping theoretical arguments are broadly encouraged. I have no doubt that Chanka and Quichua society during the Late Intermediate Period was violent, but there was more to society than what the bioarchaeology of 477 individuals from a limited number of sites can tell us. Therefore, while the grasp and scope of the research is impressive, and I almost agree that a “multifocal, well-contextualized bioarchaeological approach allows us to reconstruct the lived experiences of individuals, biological and/or social groups, and entire populations” (p. 177), there is more to Late Intermediate Period society in the Andahuaylas region than can be gleaned from human bones. We are left hankering for more.

And yet, this bold, scientifically robust study, with its strident statements and lurid details is reflective of a re-emergent zeitgeist, that of a neo-processualist movement that promotes hard science linked to wider processes and complex social theory (Webmoor Reference Webmoor2009). It is a reimagining of the old processualism, linked as never before to new emergent scientific methods—isotopes, DNA, lipids, diatoms, agent-based modelling, 3D modelling, petrography, geoarchaeology and the like—that challenges the post-processualism of the last 30 years for concrete ‘facts’ and ‘explanations’ towards a greater ‘truth’. It is to be seen whether this rising hubris will replicate the same fallacies of the past.