ABSTRACT

The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most significant changes in human history, and scholars world-wide, across multiple disciplines are engaged in understanding how and why this process took place. The South American Andes are considered to be one of the centers of domestication providing some of the world's most important foods, including potatoes and quinoa, and wool from llamas and alpacas support textile industries. Yet, our knowledge of the processes of domestication and the commitment to agriculture lags behind other regions due to small number of studies. Dr. Maria Bruno, of Dickinson College, Dr. Jose Capriles, of The Pennsylvania State University, and Dr. Christine Hastorf, of the University of California, Berkeley, will investigate the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture in the southeastern shore of Lake Titicaca basin in the South American Andes. Through new archaeological excavations and specialized analyses, this collaborative investigation, made up of a multidisciplinary team of North American and Bolivian specialists, will foster multiple opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to train and develop skills in archaeological field and laboratory procedures. The project will also involve the active participation of local indigenous Aymara communities whose traditional subsistence and land use practices have been increasingly impacted by environmental degradation and globalization. Local high school students will be trained to participate in research and create videos that illustrate research methods and data interpretation, while documenting the histories of their sites and communities. In conjunction with local agencies, the project will help to promote on-going local tourism initiatives based on cultural patrimony. The project will make educational posters for the museum and high school, and print and distribute informative pamphlets with updated information regarding nearly four millennia of cumulative resource utilization by urban, farming, herding and fishing communities that created a complex socio-environmental system of dramatic landscape-scale transformations that are still visible today.

The Lake Titicaca basin of the south-central Andes sustained some of the highest pre-Columbian population densities in the western hemisphere. It is recognized as a center of crop domestication and early agriculture. To investigate the onset of food production and landscape modification in the basin, the researchers will carry out archaeological excavations focusing on the Early Formative Period (1500-800 BCE) at the sites of Chiripa, Chiaramaya and Chiripata, located in the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia. Specifically, they will seek to answer what was the nature and timing of a commitment to domesticated plant and animal species and what was the role of climate change in either facilitating or constraining this process. To evaluate these questions, a team of specialists will carry out detailed analyses of plant and animals remains that reflect the changes in their use and management through time. A rigorous program of radiocarbon dating will permit to compare these changes to new records of past climate change, in addition to social and political transformations recorded in the archaeological record, to further on-going discussion about the transition to agriculture by humans locally and globally.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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