Early Social Life of Andean Tuber and Seed Domestication

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture initiated fundamental changes in the way people interacted with plant communities in areas beyond their places of origin. The South American Andes is one domestication center that provided two of the world’s most important crops: potatoes and quinoa. The domestication processes of both Solanum spp. and Chenopodium spp. began in the Andean highlands, yet our knowledge of the processes of domestication and the commitment to agriculture lags behind other regions. Decades of research on the Taraco Peninsula in the southern Lake Titicaca basin have amassed a systematic set of archaeological data that spans the periods that saw dramatic climatic change as well as the shift to more sedentary, agricultural lifeways. Recently, we have been focusing on potatoes and chenopods, and their early evidence in the archaeological record, to gain a better sense of their domestication process in the Titicaca Basin once the inhabitants of the region began to settle as the climate became particularly amendable to agriculture, around 3000 BCE. Through archaeobotany we are tracking how the first settlers of the basin engaged with these future staples and how these actions interweave with the Andean ontology of landscape engagement.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39859.0