Re-evaluating the Resource Potential of Lomas Fog Oasis Environments for Preceramic Hunter-Gatherers under Past ENSO Modes on the South Coast of Peru (original) (raw)
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Lomas e ephemeral seasonal oases sustained by ocean fogs e were critical to ancient human ecology on the desert Pacific coast of Peru: one of humanity's few independent hearths of agriculture and " pristine " civilisation. The role of climate change since the Late Pleistocene in determining productivity and extent of past lomas ecosystems has been much debated. Here we reassess the resource potential of the poorly studied lomas of the south coast of Peru during the long Middle Pre-ceramic period (c. 8000e4500 BP): a period critical in the transition to agriculture, the onset of modern El Ni~ no Southern Oscillation ('ENSO') conditions, and eustatic sea-level rise and stabilisation and beach progradation. Our method combines vegetation survey and herbarium collection with archaeological survey and excavation to make inferences about both Preceramic hunteregatherer ecology and the changed palaeoenvironments in which it took place. Our analysis of newly discovered archaeological sites e and their resource context e show how lomas formations defined human ecology until the end of the Middle Preceramic Period, thereby corroborating recent reconstructions of ENSO history based on other data. Together, these suggest that a five millennia period of significantly colder seas on the south coast induced conditions of abundance and seasonal predictability in lomas and maritime ecosystems, that enabled Middle Preceramic hunteregatherers to reduce mobility by settling in strategic locations at the confluence of multiple eco-zones at the river estuaries. Here the foundations of agriculture lay in a Broad Spectrum Revolution that unfolded, not through population pressure in deteriorating environments, but rather as an outcome of resource abundance.
From Refugia to Oases : Living in Arid Environments from Prehistoric Times to the Present Day, 2018
Lomas are seasonal oases sustained by ocean fogs, which flourish along the arid Pacific coast of Peru. Frédéric Engel (1973 : 271), a pioneer of Peruvian Preceramic archaeology, long ago noted that their importance 'to prehistoric human geography, in their capacity as food-and water-producing areas, has been practically ignored' : a situation not much changed today. Here we address this oversight by focus on the hitherto understudied lomas of the south coast of Peru. Our reassessment of their resource potential and new archaeological findings corroborate Engel's ideas for how lomas oases defined hunter-gatherer ecology until the end of the Middle Preceramic Period (ca. 5,000 cal. BP). Setting this archaeological record for the south coast alongside the latest reconstruction of El Niño Southern Oscillation (Enso) history, suggests that conditions of abundance and seasonal predictability in lomas and marine resources sustained during some five millennia of significantly colder seas enabled Middle Preceramic hunter-gatherers to reduce mobility by settling along the coast at the intersection of very different, seasonally highly productive lomas, riverine and marine habitats. With this widening use of resources-gathered, fished, hunted, and increasingly, cultivated-came increasing sedentism and population density and social complexity, along with technological innovation , ritual, and the division of labour. We use the term 'Mesolithic' here to mean that suite of behaviours and to inspire comparisons with those same 'Broad Spectrum Revolution' changes that preceded the emergence of agriculture elsewhere in the world.
The mid-Holocene was an extremely dry period in the Lake Titicaca Basin of South America, when lake levels were at their lowest point in the Holocene. South of the lake, a lack of outflow and very low and irregular precipitation would have created desert-like conditions. This area's 'archaeological silence' seems to reflect an effective lack of population. This situation changed drastically as lake levels rose suddenly in the centuries following 3540 cal BP. As the desert disappeared, a flux of migrants filled the landscape, probably from the population concentration in the basin's western highlands. They imported and developed new technologies and economic practices and reorganized them into an agropastoral lifeway. The emergence of agropastoralism was both rapid and widespread, as people throughout the Lake Titicaca Basin adopted this practice. This major, regional shift can be productively framed as an adaptive cycle or Holling loop. This approach builds on the robust foundation of complexity theory, emphasizes the integrated nature of humans and their environment in a single system, highlights how systems fluctuate between slow and accelerated change, and is useful for developing hypotheses. Cascading feedback loops in climate, ecology, and cultural practices generated the emergence of agro-pastoralism. This resilient system is still in use today and is currently facing major climate changes, which makes understanding its origins especially relevant.
Environmental Archaeology, 2014
In the fourth millennium BP, there were major environmental and cultural changes on the Andean altiplano of South America, but the chronology remains vague. A recent synthesis describes a slow, gradual transition from hunting and gathering to agropastoralism. This proposal is tested by refining the date of the onset of more humid and stable conditions, around 3550 cal BP, based on a Bayesian model of 26 dates from Lake Wiñaymarka and an updated calculation of the lacustrine offset. This is compared to Bayesian models of 191 dates from 20 archaeological sites, which incorporate a number of recently processed radiocarbon dates. A synthesis is presented of 15 full coverage surveys, a summed probability distribution, and a Bayesian model of the transition to ceramics, which together support a scenario of a very rapid demographic increase. Fourteen models from archaeological sites are cross-referenced in a composite model, which identifies a brief, altiplano-wide emergence of agropastoralism with starting and ending boundaries of 3540 and 3120 cal BP, respectively. This starting boundary correlates strongly with the onset of improving environmental conditions, indicating synchronous cultural and environmental change. The suite of accelerating cultural changes included a marked reduction in mobility, a demographic surge, increased subsistence diversity, the adoption of ceramics, farming and the integration of camelid herding into a remarkably resilient economic strategy still in use today. This is a highly relevant but yet to be used comparative case study for the variable tempos of ‘big histories’, and ecocultural interactions that generate rapid, emergent episodes of wide-spread and enduring cultural change.
Environmental change and economic development in coastal Peru between 5,800 and 3,600 years ago
Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences, 2009
Between ≈5,800 and 3,600 cal B.P. the biggest architectural monuments and largest settlements in the Western Hemisphere flourished in the Supe Valley and adjacent desert drainages of the arid Peruvian coast. Intensive net fishing, irrigated orchards, and fields of cotton with scant comestibles successfully sustained centuries of increasingly complex societies that did not use ceramics or loom-based weaving. This unique socioeconomic adaptation was abruptly abandoned and gradually replaced by societies more reliant on food crops, pottery, and weaving. Here, we review evidence and arguments for a severe cycle of natural disasters—earthquakes, El Niño flooding, beach ridge formation, and sand dune incursion—at ≈3,800 B.P. and hypothesize that ensuing physical changes to marine and terrestrial environments contributed to the demise of early Supe settlements.
In the Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes, narratives of agricultural change have focused exclusively on a single innovation: raised fields. In this article, I examine macrobotanical remains and other archaeological datasets to elucidate a wider range of past farming practices that contributed to processes of agricultural change on the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia, during the Formative Period (1500 B.C.E.–C.E. 500). This analysis reveals strong continuities in crop selection through time, with farmers gradually diversifying a basic set of cultigens—quinoa and tubers—but never abandoning them. Patterns in wild plant species indicate continuity in agropastoral land use up to the Late Formative Period (second century C.E.) when the unintended consequences of long-term tilling and camelid grazing transformed the botanical landscape into one that required a new set of practices to remove weeds and replenish nutrients to the soils. Examining how these practices and the farmers enacting them articulated with broader processes of demographic, environmental, and sociopolitical change reveals dynamic, multivariate courses of agricultural change even before the inclusion of raised fields. [agricultural practices, ethnobotany, archaeobotany, Lake Titicaca Basin, Andes]
Quaternary Science Reviews, 2021
Some of the earliest Andean populations settled in the region's arid coastal river valleys, supported by abundant marine life despite having domesticated plant cultigens as early as~10 ka. In the Chicama River valley, this maritime economy dominated at the Preceramic site, Huaca Prieta, until~6 ka, after which agricultural production began to increase significantly. This agricultural expansion was motivated in part by the development of arable fine-grained soils along the coast as the result of slowing sea-level rise, enhanced river floods, and unique basin lithology. Local populations made use of the stabilized floodplain and wetland settings to conduct raised-terrace farming. By~3.5 ka, growth in agriculture and the new fine-grained sediment resources led to several major cultural developments, including the production of fired-ceramic pottery and adobe-brick monument construction associated with the Cupisnique culture. Populations thereafter expanded into the middle valley, where the Salinar and Gallinazo cultures used small water-control structures to farm local ravines. These cultural and technological developments all parallel natural environmental changes driven by increasing ENSO-related water and sediment discharge. By~1.8 ka, though, further expansion of agriculture eand arable lande was driven primarily by direct human manipulation of the environment. The construction of an ever-expanding network of irrigation canals diverted increasing volumes of water and sediment to distal reaches of the Chicama valley, supporting the great Moche and Chimu civilizations, and persisting through the Inka and Colonial periods. This history of Chicama valley traces strongly coupled interactions between the human and natural environments, supporting significant socio-cultural, economic, demographic, and technological advances.
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 2011
This paper presents archaeobotanical and invertebrate evidence from the flotation and analyses of 46 archaeological contexts from six middens from the Samaca and Ullujaya basins, lower Ica Valley, south coast of Peru. This is part of one of the world’s driest deserts and organic remains can enjoy extraordinary preservation in its hyperarid climate. Each of these contexts represents snapshots with which to piece together a picture of changing human ecology in the lower Ica Valley over nearly two millennia, from Ocucaje Phases 3/4 of the Early Horizon (c. 750 b.c.); through to Early Nasca Phases 2/3 (c. a.d. 100–450); Late Nasca Phases 6/7 (c. a.d. 450–600) and Middle Horizon Epoch 2 (c. a.d. 900). They also offer proxy evidence of wider ecological changes in these basins. Read together with geoarchaeological and pollen data, the archaeobotanical data we present show a gradual intensification of agriculture from small-scale Early Ocucaje societies subsisting mainly on gathered marine and terrestrial resources, through to sophisticated irrigation agriculture by Nasca times, but culminating in a collapse of agricultural production and a return to the gathering of wild marine and plant resources much later, during the Middle Horizon. This trajectory of human ecology is consistent with the model presented elsewhere of a gradual removal of Prosopis dominated riparian woodland for the purpose of increasing agricultural production, which in time exposed the landscape of the lower Ica Valley to high-energy, episodic flood events and of one of the world’s strongest and most persistent wind regimes.