Description
We are both immensely pleased to have played supporting roles in the archaeological research that led to this volume. As a faculty member at the Universidad del Centro (Huancayo) in the 1960s and later at the Universidad Nacional de San Marcos (Lima), Matos Mendieta developed a special interest in the Upper Mantaro and adjacent Tarma drainages, and during the 1960s and 1970s, he carried out general reconnaissance and several excavations in the area between Lake Junin and Huancayo. Matos Mendieta began his field research in the Sierra Central as part of the "Proyecto Andino de Estudios Arqueologicos" sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution. As a fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in the mid-1960s, Matos Mendieta began to interact more closely with North American scholars; during this period, he began to encourage and facilitate the interests of several US. -based archaeologists in the Peruvian Sierra Central, including Craig Morris, John Murra, and Donald Thompson, who were beginning fieldwork at and around the Inka provincial center of Huanuco Pampa north of Lake Junin, and David Browman, who in 1969 carried out one of the very first systematic archaeological surveys in highland Peru over parts of the main Mantaro Valley between Huancayo and Jauja.
