Agricultural Roles in Landscapes and Taskcapes: An Interdisciplinary Approach from Northwestern Argentina

KORSTANJE, M.A.; QUESADA, M.; MALOBERTI, M.

San Francisco, California

Encuentro; SAA 80th Annual Meeting; 2015; 2015

Society for American Archaeology

Traditionally, the agriculture of the Formative Period (1000 BC-100 AD), was conceived as technologically simple and spatially reduced. However, this simplicity is reconsidered when we take into account that these technologies made possible the practice of agriculture in desert environments with eroded and underdeveloped soils, during millennia. Our research in El Bolsón valley, which is a high basin in western Catamarca, allowed us to know in detail some peasant practice as the irrigation technologies, the field preparation and other agronomic techniques as well as how the agrarian landscapes were structured in the past. In this presentation we summarize the results obtained through multiple lines of work (including landscape archeology, archaeobotany), that allowed us to discuss the idea of agriculture perpetuated from traditional models, and also rethink it from a perspective that considers the complexity of the relationship between plants, soil, water, agricultural knowledge and ways of labor organization. Thus, we have recognized a significant variability of peasant practices through which agriculture was configured during the Formative period. We have also recognized the persistence of certain aspects of this agriculture during Regional Development Period (1000 - 1500 AD), for which it has been assumed a re-articulation of production and power structures.