Camelid Herders: The Forgotten Specialists in the Coastal Señorío of Chiribaya, Southern Peru (original) (raw)
Related papers
New Research on the Late Prehistoric Coastal Polities of Northern Peru
Journal of Archaeological Research, 2017
Previously, the Chimú empire was thought to have dominated the north coast of Peru during the Late Intermediate period, virtually to the exclusion of other polities. However, new research on sites from this period has not only changed perspectives on the Chimú, but also shed light on two other important coastal polities: the Lambayeque/Sicán and the Casma, providing insights with the potential to reshape our understanding of the development of urbanism and the Andean state. This article presents a critical summary of recent literature, fieldwork, and discoveries. Analyses of these new data address a wide range of topics that can be loosely grouped into four major areas: complexity in political organization and the geopolitical landscape, variations in the urban environment, the intensification of trade and exchange, and dynamic expressions of religion and ideology. The latest interpretation of the north coast Late Intermediate period is a story of three major, competing polities that were eventually subsumed under one.
Antiquity, 2020
This is a well-proportioned and elegant book that covers a wide range-over 13 000 years of archaeology, history and ethnohistory-and diverse series of articles analysing the development of life and civilisation along the west-central seaboard of South America. As Victor Thompson's foreword succinctly points out, Michael Moseley's (1975) The Maritime foundations of Andean civilization (MFAC) hypothesis permeates every article and aspect of this book, and coming 45 years after that was first published, this volume is a very timely and welcome addition to this abiding theme. Standing on the shoulders of earlier giants such as Junius Bird, Frederic Engel, Edward Lanning and Thomas Patterson, Moseley posited that the real foundations of coastal Andean civilisation were the rich fishing grounds off the Pacific Coast. By homing in on MFAC hypothesis, indeed developing it much further than its Preceramic Period (13 000-3800 BP) roots, this book delves deep into what marine resources truly represented for these coastal populations through subsequent periods all the way to the Spanish colonial era. The volume benefits greatly from the insights provided by known stalwarts in the field, including Tom Dillehay, Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, Winifred Creamer and Jonathan Haas, and more recent professionals, such as Nicolas Goepfert, David Chicoine and Parker Van-Valkenburgh. Aside from a select number of important outliers on northern Chile and Ecuador, most of the articles deal with developments on the central and northern coasts of Peru, for which Moseley originally proposed MFAC. It is for this key area that Creamer and Haas (Chapter 5) make the interesting observation that, in light of MFAC's pliability and applicability to the Preceramic and Initial Period (3800-2900 BP), we should seriously entertain the possibility of a Preceramic Horizon based on political, ideological and economic expansion across this crucial region of the central and northern Peruvian coasts. This is a book with its heart and mind fixed firmly on the sea, and as such analogous to that, albeit more historically oriented, approach taken by David Abulafia (2011) in his volume on the Mediterranean and the communities that lived and live off that sea. As Helmer (Chapter 6, p. 165) states, MFAC challenged, and this book continues to challenge, the agriculturecentric perspectives of human societal development that so permeate our discipline. By focusing on fishers-an underrepresented and oft-marginalised group within Andean archaeology-in all their guises, the articles here examine how the sea shaped coastal identities both spatially and diachronically; and while climate is never far away from these diverse articles, the
The varied expansion strategies of the Inkas during the Late Horizon period (1430-1532 A.D.) had an enormous impact on all areas of a community’s life, including subsistence and diet. Pueblo Viejo-Pucará is an archaeological settlement in the central Andean region of Peru for which ethnohistorical evidence suggests an inhabitation by the Caringa, a coastal ethnic group under the rule of the Inka Empire. Both, the topographic location in the Andean Mountains, about 500 m above the South-Pacific Sea coast, and the political situation with tight connections to the Inka rulers suggest a wide spectrum of food sources that may have contributed to their diet. These include marine fish and seafood and locally grown agricultural products. Archaeological evidence, specifically corrals for domesticated llamas, point to pastoralism as main socioeconomic activity and meat as an important foodstuff. Being part of a broad imperial trade network may have provided access to a variety of non-locally produced goods. Moreover, a distinctive architectural pattern points to connections to or even an origin from the highlands. This study introduces an integrated archaeological, anthropological, and stable isotope study of the Caringa population at Pueblo Viejo-Pucará to explore diet and subsistence strategies, and to evaluate the hypotheses of a highland food tradition. The study combines a dental anthropological analysis, and the investigation of carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios of bone collagen and structural carbonate. It sheds light on subsistence, social differentiation and on the exploitation of marine and upland resources in a highly diverse landscape.
Frontiers
Coasts are dynamic, constantly changing ecosystems offering rich and varied foods and other resources. Compared with the monistic structure of crop production in many terrestrial parts of the world, some coastlines reflect a dualistic structure with complementary maritime and agricultural economies beginning in early prehistoric times. In particular, the Pacific coast of the Central Andes offers one of the world’s most abundant and diverse supplies of marine resources. The late Pleistocene to middle Holocene (~14,500–4,000 BP) cultural sequences from south Ecuador to north Chile vary appreciably from one region to the next, but all reveal varying degrees of mixed diets of maritime and terrestrial foods. By at least ~7,000 BP, a diversity of seafood and domesticated crops were mutually exchanged to form varied specialized and unspecialized economies in a few Andean areas. This study reports on interdisciplinary data from a complex of archaeological sites with mixed economies along the desert coast of the Chicama Valley in north Peru, specifically the Huaca Prieta area dating between ~14,500 and 3,800 BP. Around 7,500–7,000 BP, intensified maritime and agriculture economies developed simultaneously with social differentiation between public ritual monuments and outlying domestic support sites in an environment of rich marine resources and fertile estuarine wetlands in the valley. This and other coastal areas played an important and persistent early role in human population growth, community formation, and the consilience of different but complementary technologies and principles of socio-economic organization to establish the foundations for later state development along the Central Andean coast.
Estudios Latinoamericanos, 2015
Since 2002 the Culebras Valley has been the focus of an extensive archaeological surface survey and limited excavations in selected sites carried out by Polish and Peruvian scholars. Over one hundred previously unknown archaeological sites have been recorded so far, and tentative interpretations of their chronology, functions and settlement patterns have been suggested. In this article, we report results of the nine field seasons and discuss their implications. We employ fieldwork data from the archaeological sites of the Culebras Valley to reconstruct settlement patterns, subsistence and craft production, focusing on post-Middle Horizon components, as well as the impact of Chimú and Inca cultures on local pre Hispanic societies.
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.