Communal Before Domestic? Preceramic Contexts of Exotic Food Adoption in North Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists have long hypothesized the causes and conditions of the transition from foraging to food production. Of specific interest here are the social and ecological conditions generating the adoption of exotic plants. Some of the best-documented paleoecological and archaeological evidence for initial food production and the adoption of cultigens in the Central Andes comes from a variety of middle Preceramic sites (~7500–6000 cal BP) on the western slopes of the Andes (Nanchoc Valley) and along the Pacific coast (Huaca Prieta area) of north Peru, where macro- and microplant remains and human isotope and dental findings from public and domestic settings suggest that exotic cultigens first appeared as rare to infrequent exchange items and/or ritual offerings in communal sites prior to becoming stable household foods. Interdisciplinary evidence from more than forty sites in the two study areas are evaluated in terms of this suggestion.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37102.0