​The decoupling of environment ​and political change in the prehistoric southern Titicaca Basin

Summary

As the greater project of this symposium attests, we want to become more aware of the constraints of our historical training and try to not separate culture from nature, or politics from the environment in our study of the past. Towards that end, the authors have been working on understanding water and lake level regimes of the southern Titicaca Basin, to better understand the history of this shallow lake and the people that lived around it from the Formative through the Late Horizon. Throughout this prehistoric sequence a large polity, Tiwanaku, developed in this region, clearly engaging with the landscape and waterscape of their valley. Many scholars have linked Tiwanaku’s political and economic rise to a rising lake and its fall to a desiccation and lack of lake water. The new lake data presented here clearly demonstrate how the political trajectory of the prehistoric sequence does not parallel the lake’s history, thus allowing us to better understand the impact prehistoric societies had on their environments and vice versa.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Exploring Prehistoric Perceptions of "Nature": Can We Go Beyond Economic Human-Environment Interactions?

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14485