Ontologies of water: intensities and magnitudes

Summary

Increasingly, the effects of global warming take the form of destructive movements of water, whether vanishing bodies of water that create desertification or floods that damage human habitations and take lives. The extensive archaeological record of the North Coast of Peru offers a place to study long-term human strategies for living with the dangerous and unpredictable movement of water. Despite frequent earthquakes, floods and torrential rains that re-shape land- and sea-scapes, humans flourished on the North Coast, using the region’s abundant maritime and riverine resources to construct some of the earliest monumental architecture in the Americas, and later, complex state-level societies such as Chimú. Archaeological theories about the relationship between this rich archaeological record and the region’s tempestuous waters have variously included theories of punctuated equilibrium; collapse and re-building; or, more recently, long-term sustainability based on strategies of mobility and flexibility. In this paper I look for the underlying indigenous ontologies that allowed humans to flourish despite the destructive yet fertile waters that periodically inundated their homes and fields. From this perspective, our species appears as the co-producers of a fluid natureculture in which we are neither the controlling masters nor the hapless victims of water.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Making a "-cene": Archaeology, Politics, and the Anthropocene

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17564