Managing environmental diversity in the eastern foothills of the Andes: pre-Columbian agrarian landscapes in the El Alto-Ancasti mountain range

Abstract

In this paper we review the growing evidence of anthropogenic landscapes present in the semi-deciduous tropical forest biomes of eastern NW Argentina, which have remained relatively neglected in favour of arid to semi-arid western Andean regions. The evidence gathered in the Sierra de El Alto Ancasti provides an important case study where multidisciplinary methodologies have been applied to sites that document the emergence and variability in food production amongst the eastern Andean forests and grasslands of NW Argentina. Archaeological survey has found the region to be relatively unique in an NW Argentina context in terms of its preservation of pre-colonial settlement, farming landscapes, and social and political change with cultural materials spanning from 1700 BP to the present day. We discuss evidence of farming structures from surveys, plant management from phytolith analysis, and the tempo and nature of settlement from archaeological excavations available from a variety of sites in the Sierra El Alto Ancasti. We suggest that the communities that inhabited this region during the first millennium AD established a strategy of ?overlapping patchworks? of food production (Zimmerer 1999) along the different biomes that were able to contend with considerable seasonal variability. Through the use of cross-channelling, low river areas, erosion control techniques and the establishment of mesothermal crops, including maize, legumes, tubers, throughout the region, we argue that these strategies represented flexible strategies to life in a region prone to climatic change.