On the Origins of Raised-Field Farming in the Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes

Summary

One of the most dynamic debates in the archaeology of the Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes surrounds the appearance and disappearance of raised-field farming. There is now a general consensus that raised-fields were a Formative period indigenous technology that was expanded upon by the Tiwanaku state and that fell out of use, except in small pockets, when the state declined. In this paper, I use ethnographic and archaeological data from the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia to tackle the rather nebulous issue of how this technology first emerged in the Formative period. I do so by considering the practices associated with raised-field farming in the broader context of Formative period agropastoral taskscapes and climatic fluctuations that resulted in frequent lake level changes. A clearer understanding of Formative period raised-field farming will shed new light on the subsequent history of their expansion and abandonment.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Advances in Wetland Archaeology in the Americas

Keywords

Spatial Coverage