Exploring Ancient Subsistence Strategies Through Community Archaeology at Puerto Malabrigo, Chicama Valley, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We embrace community archaeology to explore ancient subsistence strategies and societal resilience to El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events at Puerto Malabrigo, Chicama Valley, Peru. Since the Middle Holocene, Andean societies have experienced ENSOs that, when most powerful, prompt heavy rainfall and flooding in some locations and severe drought in others. Today, Chicama residents continue to deal with ENSOs. In 2017, the people of Puerto Malabrigo, Chicama, fell asleep to thunder and woke up to pools as the rain leaked through their rooftops and huaicos, mudslides, and devastated farmland. Malabrigo includes Chicama’s irrigated floodplain, freshwater wetlands, the Pacific littoral, and the Paijan Desert. Given Malabrigo’s unique ecology, our research investigates how ancient Malabrigo residents survived and perhaps thrived from ENSO fluctuations. To make archaeological research on foodways and climate resilience more relevant to Malabrigo residents, we trained and hired local people in excavation and analyses and offered numerous site visits and educational and art workshops to students from February to August 2023. In this paper, we acknowledge potential risks and challenges to community archaeology and detail our methods that aim to share cultural heritage, integrate Indigenous knowledge systems, and broaden the vision of climate science to incorporate traditional knowledge.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41583.0