The Early Intermediate Period Farmer’s Almanac: Co-Producing Agriculture, Time, and Community on the North Coast of Peru.

Summary

Previous research on plant foods and social memory in the Andes has primarily focused on ritual feasting amongst elite segments of society within the confines of exclusionary monumental spaces. However, it is vital to look beyond elite-directed activities and consider ritualized commoner and quotidian practices as integral to community building and memory making. This paper will demonstrate how domestic food production and consumption, the construction of agricultural landscapes, and wild plant collection in hinterlands are, indeed, also practices which co-produce collective conceptions of time, space, and social identity. Planting, harvesting, collecting, redistribution for tribute, processing, and consumption of plants were intrinsically associated with seasonal cycles and social events experienced by communities as a whole. We integrate paleoethnobotanical and geo-spatial data from two Early Intermediate Period sites occupied during both the rise and subsequent decline of the Virú polity on the North Coast of Peru. The urban Gallinazo Group site and administrative centre Huaca Santa Clara provide interesting case studies for understanding place-making via the liminal spaces between core and hinterland within which agricultural production took place, as well as the social integration of community members through food-centric redistribution economies over several generations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• New Perspectives on the Archaeology of Social Memory in the Central Andes

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15425