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

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th 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; 1000-1450 AD), the Late Horizon (1450-1535), and the Early Spanish Colonial Period (1535-1700). Like many Andean regions, Chachapoyas was colonized in the 16th and 17th 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 archaeobotanical results from household and public contexts from the LIP through Spanish Colonial occupation to investigate variation 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 households’ ability to acquire available foods and I employ intra-household comparison to trace access. Combining data on availability and access, I consider how 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 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40089.0