Paleoethnobotany at Cerro la Virgen: Exploring the Lives of People and Plants at a Chimu Town in the Hinterland of Chan Chan

Summary

This paper explores the roles of plant foodways in the social, political, and economic organization of Cerro la Virgen, a Late Chimu site in the Moche Valley of North Coastal Peru. Located in the hinterland of Chan Chan, the capital the Chimu Empire (AD 1000-1460), Cerro la Virgen comprised a diverse community of craftspeople, farmers, and fisherfolk. Recent paleoethnobotanical investigations of assemblages from different household contexts afford a closer look at the diverse economic strategies of the inhabitants of different households, which I contextualize within the broader history of corvée labor, exchange, and social interaction witnessed during the Chimu empire. I consider issues both methodological and theoretical, including (1) the extraordinary preservation of organic remains at the site, which allows us to examine the importance of fruits and other resources that do not often preserve in charred macrobotanical assemblages; (2) the role of plants within a broader subsistence economy that may indicate wider relations of interregional interaction and exchange; and (3) a questioning of the assumption that the community of Cerro la Virgen functioned primarily as a state-controlled agricultural enterprise.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Like Frejoles in a Pod: Examining the Current State of Paleoethnobotany in Peru   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

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