A Thousand Years of Wetland Management at Hacienda Zuleta in the Ecuadorian Andes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Nestled within a deeply incised valley in the eastern cordillera of the Andes, the archaeological site of Zuleta is an immensely humanized hydrologic landscape. A complex network of perennially and seasonally wet streams and canals crisscross the pastures along the valley floor carrying water from the paramo to the Rio Tahuando. But a thousand years ago this landscape was vastly different than it is today. Buried raised field agricultural features and an extensive peat layer hint at a time before the arrival of the Spanish when the valley was much marshier and wetland agriculture was a viable subsistence strategy. The current paradigm maintains that raised field agriculture in the Ecuadorian highlands was abandoned after the AD 1280 eruption of Quilotoa volcano. But historic documents and archaeological evidence suggest that the real story is much more nuanced and regionally varied. A shift in climate and the Spanish effort to drain wetlands in the following centuries may have made wetland agriculture obsolete or untenable. This paper details our efforts to explore the disappearance of wetland agriculture using a multiproxy paleoenvironmental reconstruction approach including geochemistry, pollen, phytoliths, eDNA, and stable carbon isotopes to compare raised fields at Zuleta before and after the eruption.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36640.0