In this book, Jerry Moore argues that there are certain cultural behaviours (‘acts’) which human beings elaborate through time. Because these acts leave an intentional or an unintentional trace in the material remains of a people, he argues that they are amenable to archaeological investigation. His book lucidly presents a theoretical and methodological approach for dealing with four overlapping issues. The first enquires into the movement of the human voice in order to investigate the relationship between social cohesion and conflict in the arrangement of residences in gatherer-hunter encampments. Taking into account the conditions in which sound is dispersed and how intelligible human voices might be at the level of a whisper or of a conversation, he examines some ethnographic reports of camp sites from which he extrapolates data for application to an archaeological sample consisting of Archaic and Early Formative sites in Chile, Peru and Ecuador. His argument is that where people live in dwellings whose fabric is acoustically permeable, there would be an expectation that residences should be situated at distances of no more that four to eight metres apart, unless social tensions cause a more dispersed arrangement. In that case, individual dwellings would have a distance of more than eight metres between them. This insight is applicable to archaeological sites if the component structures have a good likelihood of having been used contemporaneously.

The second issue investigates the relationship between the character of authority and ritual space in ceremonial architecture. It addresses the debate between authors who attribute the construction of monumental architecture in the Central Andes c. 1800–1000 B.C. to hierarchical societies and those who attribute it to non-hierarchical societies. Moore reviews a sample of ethnographic cases in order to explore the ways in which religious practice might be connected with constructed space, noting the character of the ceremonial architecture where the medium is an ecstatic shaman or a canonist. Here he uses categories employed by Sullivan in Icanchu's drum (1988). He relates these observations to certain variables: permanence, centrality, ubiquity, scale and visibility, which he applies to ceremonial architecture of the Formative Period in southern Ecuador and northern and central Peru. His hypothesis is that religious authority is not based on ecstatic shamanism ‘where ceremonial architecture is generational or multigenerational in permanence, is found at the regional or interregional level, is large-scale, and incorporates public-far and public-distant spaces’ (p. 121).

Arguing that religious authority must be sustained through time, Moore moves onto issue three to examine the archaeology of processions. Following Bell (Ritual: perspectives and dimensions, 1977), he treats processions as performative rituals which, according to Handelman (Models and mirrors, 1990), are based on a logic designed to fulfil the needs of the particular social order in which they take place. Accordingly, Moore considers a sample of ethnographically and historically recorded cases with a view to discern continuities and differences in the formal design of Andean processions. The aspects he considers, and relates to archaeological evidence, concern the use of time, space, sound, roles and props, which constitute the necessary material items used in public events connected with mortuary ceremonies.

The final issue revolves round the notion of ‘house societies’ as initially proposed by Lévi-Strauss and as developed more recently by anthropologists and archaeologists. House societies are dynasties which are concerned with the transmission of status, name, property and privileges. Archaeologically they might be detected through ‘the actual sustained existence and elaboration of a house, the placement of burials within the structure, the exchange of heirlooms, the incorporation of architectural features in sequential constructions, or the transformation of houses into temples’ (p. 185). Moore sees the walled compound architecture of the Chimú culture, on the north coast of Peru, as constituting ‘noble’ houses limited to Chimú royalty because, amongst other factors, the noble compounds experienced a continued existence through the placement of burials and in the transformation of dwellings into ceremonial platforms within the enclosure. He is careful to address the importance of the transmission of non-material items (such as status, names and privileges) that is present in Lévi-Strauss's original formulation of the concept of house societies and how they might become accessible to analysis through the cultural acts performed by the members of the society in question. Hence the material characteristics of the compounds are qualitatively different from the residences of commoner families in Chimú society, going beyond superficial differences in the degree of architectural elaboration. Archaeologists have frequently projected ethnographic evidence onto the archaeological record using interpretations of moiety social organisation in the Andes by social anthropologists writing in the 1980s and 1990s. House societies and moiety organisation are not necessarily mutually exclusive models; Moore has effectively provided us with an alternative strategy for developing models to account for social organisation in the Andes.

The overarching theme of this book concerns human experiences of place, more specifically experiences in built environments. It is an extremely worthy successor to Moore's cogently argued 1996 book, Architecture and power in the ancient Andes: the archaeology of public buildings. Issues two, three and four, in particular, complement the analytical strategies that Moore developed in his earlier book. Although the focus of the current book is Andean, it deserves to be read by a wide readership of Americanists and those interested in other parts of the world. It provides an innovative strategy based on ethnographic review and extrapolation. Therefore it goes beyond the ad hoc use of ethnographic analogies and it is refreshing to read an archaeological work that is based on an in-depth knowledge of literature in social/cultural anthropology.

One final (minor) point is that figure 4.6 shows a burial from Chinchaysuyu, rather than an Inka one, as stated in the caption.