Marking the crown: Chimú territorial expansion and the appropriation of ancestral water resources in the highland Andes (AD 1000–1476)

Rock art in the precontact Andes was frequently associated with venerated, pacarina water spring features. As nodes in the cultural landscape, pacarina were, and still are, considered critical access points to the primordial underworld from which the Ancestors arose to the world above and appropriating them was vital linking identity to the land, and to territorial expansion. During the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1476), the Chimú Kingdom on present‐day Peru's central and north coasts aggressively expanded their influence in a time characterized by drought, conflict, and political fragmentation. This research focuses on a key rock art panel at Diablo Retrato, a rock shelter and pacarina situated at the headwaters of the Fortaleza River (4087 m above sea level), a highland landscape feature that was beyond the sphere of Chimú control and was a protected locale of the neighboring Chancay peoples to the south, a polity with whom the Chimú had combative relations. I combine colonial, ethnographic accounts with iconographic analysis, and radiocarbon dates obtained from soot samples on Diablo Retrato's walls to demonstrate how this rock art panel linked this pacarina to the Chimú royalty in the interest of expanding influence and appropriating valuable cultural and water resources.