Human–environment interactions in the Lake Junín basin: Fire, megafauna, deforestation, and domestication, from the peopling of the Andes to the Inca Empire

Abstract

Human–environment interactions are a focus of interdisciplinary research in the high Andes, recently invigoratedby sediment-core data from Lake Junín (Chinchaycocha). On the basis of these records, recent articles haveargued that humans arrived in the Junín basin 13 thousand calibrated years ago (kya), set large-scale fires, andhunted Pleistocene megafauna to extinction. Declines in montane tree pollen beginning ~4 kya have beenattributed to deforestation, camelid domestication, and agriculture on the high Andean puna. In this paper, wecritically examine these arguments and contrast them with a compilation of archaeological data from the LakeJunín basin including 113 radiocarbon dates (12 unpublished), settlement patterns, camelid osteometry, macrobotanicalremains, Inca period sites, and ethnographic and ethnohistoric descriptions of herding and farming.These data suggest that the earliest archaeological evidence for human occupation is not until ~11 kya, and thereis no clear evidence for interaction with Pleistocene megafauna. Although the Junín basin is often cited as acenter for camelid domestication in the middle Holocene, this claim remains tenuous, since osteometry strugglesto distinguish wild and domestic camelids. Finally, ethnohistoric and ethnographic information offer no supportfor the argument that the basin was a "manufactured landscape" in the late Holocene. Moving forward, werecommend more careful consideration of (1) the mismatch of temporal resolution in paleoecological andarchaeological chronologies, (2) the potential spatial mismatch in the catchment area of palaeoecological proxiesand archaeological datasets, and (3) ambiguity in Sporormiella as a proxy for fauna and charcoal as a proxy forhuman activity. We suggest that future work on paleoecological proxies from 0.7 to 0.3 kya could be harnessed tobuild a comparative baseline, since these centuries saw large populations of humans and domesticated camelidsnear the lake. Our goal is to promote more robust reconstructions of human–environment interactions in the LakeJunín basin and elsewhere.