Strategizing Food Security under Colonial Rule at Transconquest Purun Llaqta del Maino, Chachapoyas, Peru

Summary

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

How does colonialism impact local food strategies? This paper considers this question at Purun Llaqta del Maino (PLM), Chachapoyas, Peru, a site with continuous occupation from the Late Intermediate period (LIP) (AD 1000–1450), the Late Horizon (1450–1535), and the Early Spanish colonial period (1535–1700). Like many Andean regions, Chachapoyas was colonized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the Inka and Spanish in quick succession. Such colonial expansions can affect food systems by introducing new foods, extracting food and labor through taxes, and introducing or reifying inequalities that alter food access. I present microbotanical and macrobotanical results from household and public contexts from the LIP through Spanish colonial occupation to investigate variations in food availability and access over time. I consider availability a measure of food acquisition on a community-wide scale, which I measure by tracing ubiquity of plants through time. Access, on the other hand, relates to individuals’ or households’ ability to acquire available foods. I employ intra-household comparisons to trace access. Combining data on availability and access, I consider the ways imperial impositions affected PLM foodways, as well as the strategies that inhabitants employed to negotiate these changes with their biological and cultural needs for adequate foods.

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): 37351.0