Maria C. Bruno - Böcker

Growing the Taraco Peninsula is an examination of long-term human-environmental interactions through agriculture among Indigenous communities of the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia, located on the shores of Lake Titicaca in the Andes. Maria Bruno weaves together ethnographic observations of modern-day Aymara farming practices with an in-depth study of archaeological remains, particularly plants, to examine the development of agricultural landscapes through time.  Beginning with the first small-scale communities of the Formative period (1500 BCE–500 CE) through the development of the Tiwanaku state (500–1100 CE), Bruno draws upon ethnographic insights from modern-day Indigenous farming practices on the peninsula as well as archaeological evidence from excavations at four sites to explore the landscapes and human-plant relationships that Taraco communities created through their agricultural practices. Through evaluation of environmental data on climate and land-use dynamics—rainfall, lake level, and soil character and distribution—she proposes a new hypothesis of how raised-field agriculture may have emerged in the region. With a detailed analysis of foodways at the Kala Uyuni site, her study reveals how Indigenous Taraco communities sustainably incorporated crops and wild plants into their daily and special-occasion meals, connecting the agricultural landscapes to local and regional social and political dynamics.  Bringing together several indicators of the region’s long-term history and demonstrating that shifts in agriculture do not neatly correspond to the changes traditionally highlighted by archaeological culture histories, Growing the Taraco Peninsula reveals Indigenous landscape creation through farming on the Taraco peninsula as a critical example of sustainability. This valuable contribution to Andean archaeology is also of interest to scholars, students, and the general reader concerned about the environment, sustainable farming, sustainability, Andean history, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

This volume contributes to the emerging topic of social paleoethnobotany with a series of papers exploring dynamic aspects of past social life, particularly the day-to-day practices and politics of procuring, preparing, and consuming plants. The contributors to this volume illustrate how one can bridge differences between the natural and social sciences through the more socially-focused interpretations of botanical datasets. The chapters in this volume draw on a diversity of plant-derived datasets, macrobotanical, microbotanical, and molecular, which contribute to general paleoethnobotanical practice today. They also carefully consider the contexts in which the plant remains were recovered. These studies illustrate that the richest interpretations come from projects that are able to consider the widest range of data types, particularly as they aim to move beyond simple descriptionsof food items and environmental settings. The authors in this volume address several themes including: the collection of wild resources, the domestication of crops and spread of agriculture, the role of plant remains in questions regarding domestic life, ritual, and gender as well as the broader implications of a socially-engaged paleoethnobotany. These studies point a path forward for the constantly evolving field of paleoethnobotany, one that is methodologically rigorous and theoretically engaged. Together, these papers shed light on ways in which the specialized analysis of plant remains can contribute to theory building and advancing archaeological understanding of past lifeways.