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Ceremonial architecture at the site of Huaca Colorada in the Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, is analyzed as a ritually charged thirdspace, an interpretive move that illuminates both the creative power of place and the cultural particulars of Moche identity politics and ideological struggles. This perspective permits interpretation of how Moche monumental architecture was directly complicit in the construction of personhood, community, and power specific to the Jequetepeque Valley during the Late Moche Period (AD 600–850). Ultimately, the article demonstrates how the application of place-sensitive heuristics can improve archaeological investigations of the role of ritual performance in the creation of political subjectivities.

Archaeological investigations of public spectacle as mediated architecturally can provide an effective means to interpret culturally specific power asymmetries in prehistoric societies and the essential role of ritual performance in the creation of diverse forms of political subjectivity. A diachronic study of Late Formative (300–100 BC) and Moche (AD 550–800) ceremonial architecture from the Jequetepeque Valley in northern Peru demonstrates that archaeologists can approximate how power relations were materialized, conceptualized and contested in the Andes through their theatrical performance. Ultimately, a comparison of the performative construction of power with traditional archaeological indices of class-based inequalities reveals intriguing contradictions that both complicate and enrich our understanding of changing political structures in ancient Jequetepeque.

The main objective of this review is to consider what archaeology can contribute to general anthropological theories on "ritual in its own right" and to highlight the potential for advancing knowledge about ritual experience as a distinctive material process. An examination of the exceptional material frame marking ceremonial events demonstrates the value of ritual as a heuristic and challenges archaeologists who privilege the interpretation of religion, affect, ontology, or cultural rationalities as necessarily determinative of the ritualization process. Therefore, archaeologists should not interpret ritual places and residues as immediate proxies of other sociopolitical realities but instead should base their inferences on cross-contextual analyses of archaeological data sets. Ultimately, attention to the amplified materialization of the ritual process, often entailing the performative bundling of disparate material items in archaeological deposits, permits a re-evaluation of theories proposing that ritual is intimately connected to agency and power. 329