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The bilingual conference from which the present volume emerged was conceived as a response to this situation, and was held in Lima, Peru in August of 2007. Conference participants were drawn from universities in Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, and the United States to speak about their ongoing research along the Pacific coast of South America. By organizing sessions not by geographic zone but around common themes and questions, such as the mechanisms of state expansion or the emergence and maintenance of sociopolitical complexity, we hoped to facilitate a comparative approach to prehispanic coastal societies. We encouraged participants to emphasize not high theory or case-specific empirical details, but rather discuss concrete attempts to link research questions and methodology and place their work in broader comparative frameworks relevant to the coast. In addition to facilitating ...