From Food to Fodder: Colonial Settlement and Changing Relationships with Prosopis on Peru's North Coast in the 16th Century CE

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Colonial (re)settlement is a process of rearticulation in which people's relationships with landscapes and political institutions are often drastically reconfigured. These relationships include not just attachments to places and configurations of built environments, but also connections to water, land, plants, and animals. We explore how relationships between Indigenous people and the landscapes of Peru's arid north coast region changed during the process of Spanish colonization and Indigenous resettlement in the 16th century CE. We focus on Prosopis, a keystone species that dominates the region's dry forest and which has served as a source of Indigenous sustenance, fuel, and land stabilization for millennia. Archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological, and isotopic evidence from the site of Carrizales, in Peru's Zaña valley, suggests that Prosopis shifted from being mainly a human comestible to a source of fodder during the course of Spanish colonization. We explore why this shift happened, alongside its longer terrm consequences.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow