Science Briefs
Contact: Joe Carr: (207) 581-3571
Ancient diversification
Archaeological work along Peru’s southern coast over the past several decades has largely supported ethnohistoric accounts by 16th- and 17th-century Europeans, which depicted prehispanic life as dependent on specialized economic activities related to fishing or agriculture.
However, recent excavations at Wawakiki in the midst of the Osmore region, one of the southernmost valleys of Peru, have revealed communities involved in complex, wide-ranging economic organization and production strategies as the Chiribaya people responded to the effects of population growth and diminishing agricultural potential.
Communities along this rugged intervalley coastal zone may have constituted a third division of society, according to University of Maine archaeologist Gregory Zaro, writing of his field excavations in that area in a recent issue of Latin American Antiquity. Rather than relying primarily on the highland resources of the Andean slopes or specialized economic activities related primarily to farming or fishing, communities along the intervalley coast appear to have satisfied economic needs by intensively pursuing multiple subsistence strategies in agriculture, fishing and gathering of wild terrestrial resources.
Due in part to centuries of decreased highland precipitation that stressed lower valley farming communities along the Ilo River, the Chiribaya expanded into the relatively unpopulated intervalley coast and focused more on diversified community-level production. According to Zaro, Wawakiki and some neighboring communities represent a historically contingent response to both cultural and biological necessities and the environment during the Late Intermediate period (A.D. 1200