Water, Maps, and Mountains: Shifting Water Taskways in the Andes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the past as in the present water was and is a central material element of the communities of the highland Andes. Underpinning their relationship with water and the taskways this entails has been the constant negotiation and impact of human-human and human-ecology relationships. In this regard, these populations’ relationship with water has changed through time, influenced by warfare, colonization, and social change. Here, I examine this shift from the late prehispanic period (AD 1000–1532), through the Spanish colonial period (AD 1532–1826), and down to the present in the Cordillera Negra, north-central Andes. I trace how water taskways and the hydraulic architecture that sustain canals, amunas, reservoirs, and dams have swung majorly from a cosmological-economic to a commodity-economic model. In this regard, a loss of religious resonance in regard to water in the past was supplanted by the historic and present-day critical need to secure scarce hydric resources in the face of, respectively, colonial-elite oppression and climate change. Nowadays, water fragility has further precipitated a shift from artisanal constructions of stone and clay toward a development-led agenda where cement is king, with a growing disavowal of ancestral knowledge and taskways. Attempts to counteract this trend often meets considerable resistance.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38107.0