Creating a Fisher’s Body: Using Ethnobioarchaeology to Reveal the Caballito de Totora-Body-Fish-Sea Assemblage in Ancient Huanchaco, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

On the North Coast of Peru, archaeological evidence suggests artisanal fishers have used caballito de totora (reed) boats for over 3,000 years. In the modern-day fishing and surfing town of Huanchaco in the Moche Valley, these crescent-shaped boats are still used daily for gathering fish—a practice deeply embedded in the community. Excavations in Huanchaco at the La Iglesia Site by the Programa Arqueológico Huanchaco (PAHUAN) identified a late Early Horizon (ca. 400–200 BCE) cemetery of a small-scale fishing community. Bioarchaeological analyses identified a pattern of enthesopathies for particular individuals that correlated with expected stress markers from observations of modern-day artisanal fishers in Huanchaco. These observations are detailed to show how caballito de totora use can cause irreversible skeletal changes. The body, the caballito de totora, marine resources, and sea are all part of an assemblage. Following the framework detailed by Delsol (2019), I draw on Lefebvre’s “social spaces” (1991) and Ingold’s (2001) “skill” to illustrate how the caballito de totora shaped, and was shaped by, the fisher’s body in the practice of fishing in the sea—creating a “fisher’s body” qualitatively different from the bodies of the rest of the community. This presentation has photos of human remains.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35936.0