Making a Meal at the Late Moche (AD 600-850) Site of Wasi Huachuma, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Creating a meal at the Late Moche (AD 600-850) site of Wasi Huachuma was not simply a matter of visiting the pantry and cooking the ingredients. It required the knowledge of whom to acquire ingredients from, when the ingredients were available, and how to process them. The culinary materials recovered from Wasi Huachuma indicate that knowledge of agricultural products such as maize (Zea mays), squash (Cucurbita sp.), chilli pepper (Capsicum sp.), and potato (Solanum tuberosum) was combined with that of terrestrial and marine protein sources including camelids (Lama sp.), guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus), and a variety of fish (Mugil cephalus, Galeichthys peruvianus, and Cynoscion sp.), mollusks (Donax obesulus, Polinices sp.), and arthropods (Platyxanthus orbignyi). The occupants of Wasi Huachuma not only used their knowledge of the cycles of availability of these materials in order to feed themselves, but also knew what tools and utensils were necessary to process them for consumption and the culturally appropriate ways to consume them. This paper discusses how the people of Wasi Huachuma acquired, processed, and consumed their meals through their application of cultural knowledge of the relationships between the physical environment and the various groups of people collecting and producing food in the region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23929