Eating Local: Plant Use and Identity in the Cinti Valley, Bolivia, in the Late Intermediate Period

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Cinti Valley, Bolivia, has been occupied for at least 9,000 years, with an intensification in settlement in the Late Intermediate period. In 2004 Rivera Casanovas proposed that the sites in the Cinti Valley formed a three-tier site hierarchy, with a capital, local centers, and small villages. To study the impact of these settlement patterns on food and plant use in the valley, I sorted flotation samples collected from Palca Chica, a small village, and El Porvenir, a local center. I then compared the botanical assemblages of the two sites to study the differences between a small village and a local center, finding more local foods such as cactus, portulaca, and amaranth from El Porvenir, and more Andean staple foods like quinoa and corn from Palca Chica. Additionally, to understand how plant use in the Cinti Valley relates to the rest of the Andes, I compared my results to those of other Andean paleoethnobotanical studies from the Late Intermediate period. I found that the Cinti Valley sites had comparatively more local plant seeds and less traditional Andean staples compared to the other sites, suggesting that the residents of Palca Chica and El Porvenir developed their own local diets and identities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37023.0