Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Agricultural Production in the Emergence of Chiefdoms in Tierradentro, Southwestern Colombia

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Under the direction of Dr. Robert D. Drennan, Ms. Andrea Cuellar will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Her research focuses on the initial development of complex hierarchical social organization in the Eastern piedmont of Ecuador during the last few centuries BC. As in other parts of the Andes, the development of complex societies has been attributed to the extremely varied environments packed closely together because of the sharp variations in altitude which this mountain range presents. At the time of the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century, residents of different altitude zones often specialized in the cultiva-tion of crops especially adapted to local conditions and exchanged their products for those of other zones. Andeanists have often tended to as-sume that such economic patterns characterized the much more distant past as well, but in fact there is very little archeological evidence to document patterns of agricultural production in these societies. This project will map out settlement distribution over a region of 200 km2 and conduct test excavations in a sample of sites for the recovery of pollen samples and plant macroremains. The pollen samples from cultural con-texts will provide a sensitive indicator of the species of plants culti-vated in gardens near the house, and thus monitor patterns of local ag-ricultural production. The plant macroremains will reflect plant species brought into the household and manipulated there, and thus will monitor patterns of consumption. The delineation of changing patterns of re-gional political centralization and social complexity by the settlement survey will combine with the reconstruction of patterns of production and consumption. It will, as a result, be possible to determine whether changes in the one accompany changes in the other chronologically, and thus whether they might be causally related. As a consequence we will be better able to evaluate whether patterns of specialized economic produc-tion must underlie the development of social hierarchies and political centralization, as some anthropologists have long argued. The two might be found to go hand in hand in the Valle de los Quijos sequence, or it could be found that complex regional organization emerged long before specialized agricultural production did. The research will provide ar-cheological documentation of a sequence of 2,000 to 3,000 years during which societies developed that integrated thousands of people in numer-ous communities scattered through a region. It will also document the nature of the economic base that sustained these societies, and evaluate the importance of specialized agricultural production in that economic base.