Food for the Ayllus: Plants Access and Social Meaning in the lowland Tiwanaku sites of Omo and Rio Muerto

Summary

Tiwanaku, one of the first Andean states, spread during the Middle Horizon (AD 500-1000) from the Bolivian Altiplano into the lowland territories of Cochabamba and Moquegua in order to acquire the resources that were lacking in the highlands, a strategy termed by Murra as the "vertical archipelago". Plants such as maize and coca were among the primary resources that the Tiwanaku sought in these valleys, and different social groups, ayllus or elites, were probably in charge of accessing and redistribute them, as suggested by archaeobotanical research on Tiwanaku domestic contexts (Wright et al. 2003). In this paper we test this hypothesis with a paleoethnobotanical analysis of Tiwanaku household contexts from the sites of Omo and Rio Muerto, located in the Moquegua Valley. The Moquegua Valley presented a large Tiwanaku occupation from AD 600 to AD 1000 ca. Two main ceramic styles, representing different Tiwanaku social groups, termed Omo and Chen Chen, have been identified by Goldstein (2005). Our objective in this paper is to assess differences in food access, consumption and processing between the two groups of colonists through the analysis of the presence and distribution of food plants in the domestic contexts of the Omo and Rio Muerto sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Food and Culture in the Andes

Keywords

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