Ontologies of Water on Peru's North Coast

Summary

The power of water is all-important in the long history of Peru’s North Coast: the arid environment, the transformative effects of irrigation, and the devastating force of the ENSO (El Niño) ecological phenomenon. Archaeological theorizing about North Coast societies has often focused on the shaping force of water; this paper suggests bringing emergent thinking about the human/nonhuman relationship to bear on this topic. Twentieth century Western science saw water as something to control through the rational application of technology, and anthropologists often interpreted non-western water rituals as attempts by pre-scientific people to achieve this technological control. In the Andes, for example, human sacrifice has been interpreted as an effort to convince the gods to bring rain or avert floods. But new evidence points to alternative models, in which co-habitation rather than absolute control is the desired end. These include: theoretical critiques of the universality of the nature/culture divide; environmentalist critiques of the failure of engineers to control water in New Orleans and elsewhere; comparative data on water management by other non-Western societies; and Andean cultural evidence from the Huarochiri manuscript and North Coast ceramics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Powerful Places in the Ancient Andes

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