Agricultural crisis in the ancient Southern Andes: Trajectories and Evidence for its Archaeological Study

Abstract

When discussing economic crises, we could say that in the ancient past, those most common and critical have involved the lack of staple foods and/or the spices used for their preservation. Because of this, the literature on world history frequently contains references to agricultural crises and their serious consequences for past populations. Although this subject has recently gained renewed interest in socio-economic research regarding famines in general, access to food, consequences of the "Green Revolution", and issues of “Alimentary Sovereignty”, it has also been explored in archaeology from another perspective, as a driver of political and social changes in the past. Beginning with a review of types of agricultural crises, we will then focus on pre-hispanic and colonial situations from the South-Central and Meridional Andes. In these regions, recent research involving agriculture and ancient peasant life has brought back the inspiration that had been lost since the political repression of Marxist thought in South American archaeology in the late 1970´s. As part of this revival of agricultural studies it has been necessary to reconstruct the subject’s cognitive fabric, including research on basic factors of agrarian systems, such as infrastructure and technology. In this paper I critically examine agricultural crises as a subject that integrates space, technology, and society in their archaeological and methodological manifestations. My goal is to combine the results of archaeological investigations of ancient agriculture, including technological and multi-proxy paleoclimatic aspects, with the social dimensions of economy, in order to develop a non-technocentric theory of ancient Andean staple food production. I introduce specific case studies from North-western Argentina, where archaeologists have begun to interpret the agricultural environment, with in-depth studies of architecture remains, soils and artefacts associated with agricultural practices. As a further step I have started to define the social actors of each process from archaeological evidence as well as from Andean historical and ethnographic sources.