Chapter 6 Ritual and Plant Use at Conchopata: An Andean Middle Horizon Site Matthew P. Sayre and William T. Whitehead Introduction Andean ritual is materialized in architecture, suggesting procession and pilgrimage, and in hearths and ceramics, informing us about smell, taste, hearing, touch, and sight—and thus about smoke and alcoholic transformation, marking the shift from real to ritual time and demonstrating the powers of the telluric ancestors and the life-giving forces of the dead. Several theoretical approaches to ritual exist within the Andean literature, but there is much that can still be studied with these rich data sets that illustrate a range of rituals. (Hastorf 2007: 97) The corporeal elements of ritual benefit from and are enhanced by plants. The food, drink, and mind-altering substances of the ancient world were critical elements of past ritual practices. Plants can be used in myriad manners, but in many instances plant-derived products are linked to specific occasions. For example, sacramental wine and table wine are both made from grapes, yet the spaces in which they are consumed and their significance could not be more different. The separation of the ritual object or event from its quotidian counterpart is a constant challenge in archaeology. This is especially true when the same spaces and objects are the loci of these events. Here we attempt to shed light on some of these tensions in our analysis of past plant use through the analysis of spatial, architectural, ceramic, and botanical evidence. This chapter will examine past ritual practice at Conchopata, a Middle Horizon (650–1000 AD) site in Peru. The results from the site will be compared to those from other Middle Horizon sites. We also examine the initial M.P. Sayre (&) Department of Anthropology, University of South Dakota, 326 East Hall, Vermillion, SD 57069, USA e-mail: Matthew.Sayre@usd.edu W.T. Whitehead SWCA Environmental Consultants, 5647 Jefferson Street NE, Albuquerque, NM 87109, USA e-mail: wwhitehead@swca.com © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 M.P. Sayre and M.C. Bruno (eds.), Social Perspectives on Ancient Lives from Paleoethnobotanical Data, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52849-6_6 121