Defining the Prehispanic Andean Community:
An Application of the Archaeology of Landscapes
by Dr. Clark L. Erickson
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania Museum
Email: cerickso@sas.upenn.edu

The agrarian community in the central Andes (Peru and Bolivia) has been the subject of numerous studies by historians and ethnographers. Archaeologists employ these studies both as deductive models to test in the field and as inductive explanations of archaeological record. Others argue that, because of the changes wrought by the European Conquest and modern world systems, historic and ethnographic communities bear little resemblance to the prehispanic predecessors. Archaeologists reduce the community to a single settlement, or cluster of small settlements, usually the sites on the lowest rung on a hierarchy of settlements. The inhabitants that made up agrarian communities are portrayed as faceless masses in the political economy models that frame prehistory in a top-down approach.

I argue that the Andean community is particularly amenable to archaeological study because its ethnographic and historical signature is so clearly grounded in fixed territories, residence, land tenure, and landscape capital (defined here as multigenerational infrastructure and knowledge systems pertaining to settlement, communication, transportation, farmland, and identity). Andean peoples, past and present, provide us with a range of definitions of community rooted in the physical landscape. In using Andean ethnography and history to develop a spatial model of social organization, I do not assume that Andean communities are homogeneous or static. The ethnographic and historical records provide evidence for both change and continuity in agrarian social organization. The archaeological record documents change and continuity as a complex palimpsest of cultural features on the landscape. Andean agrarian communities do not simply occupy land; they are physically embedded in it.

Historical and contemporary ethnographic studies provide a dynamic model of the Andean community in space and time. Participation in cooperative work ventures (primarily reciprocal labor relations) and common celebration of ritual events defines membership in community and sub-community groups (ayllus, parcialidades). This membership has material correlates in the landscape and structures the physical boundaries between communities. Instead of assuming change or continuity, these models of the community area tested and evaluated against the archaeological record. Anomalies and discontinuities between the models and the archaeological evidence provide insights about the origins of agrarian lifeways, state formation processes, responses to physical and social environmental change, and resistance to state authority.

In this presentation, I will examine the archaeological evidence for agrarian communities in the Lake Titicaca Basin of Peru and Bolivia using a landscape approach. Prehispanic farming communities completely transformed the physical environment into a cultural or anthropogenic landscape. In terms of labor, volume of materials, and formal design, much of this landscape transformation is monumental in scale (rivaling the traditionally recognized monuments of ceremonial and political centers associated with centralized state societies). Analysis of the formal patterning of landscape features provide powerful means to study the structures of everyday life, land tenure, local worldview and aesthetics, social interaction, and agency. The archaeology of landscapes seeks to people the past and focus attention on the people ignored in traditional approaches to prehistory.

Clark L. Erickson, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Anthropology
Associate Curator University Museum Department of Anthropology
University of Pennsylvania Museum
University of Pennsylvania
33rd and Spruce Streets
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6398
email: cerickso@sas.upenn.edu
tel. 215-898-2282
fax. 215-898-7462
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cerickso/

PhD University of Illinois 1988

Appointments: Anthro Dept Faculty; Assoc Curator, American Section, U Museum; Latin American Cultures Program

Research Interests: archaeology; South America and New World; archaeology of landscapes; prehistoric agricultural systems; technology and social organization; analogy; ethnobotany; experimental and applied archaeology.

Graduate Seminar: The Archaeology of Landscapes
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cerickso/land/Anth557.html
Applied Archaeology in the Bolivian Amazon (Neotropical Cultural Landscapes and Historical Ecology)
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cerickso/applied.html

Photo info:

The patterned agrarian landscape in the Lake Titicaca basin, Peru. Precolumbian terraced field walls and boundaries cover a steep mountain slope (upper left to center). The faint patterns of raised field platforms and canals mark the flat lake plain (lower right). The dense network of roads, paths, and canals embedded in the landscape link archaeological and contemporary settlements (Aerial photograph of Pomata, Peru, from 1970).