Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Long Term Cultural Ties Across Environmental Zones

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

Humans have the unique ability to adapt and live in a wide variety of challenging environments. Groups living at high altitudes, like in the Peruvian Andes, experience not only physiological challenges but also significant environmental limitations that have the potential to drastically affect productive subsistence practices. In addition to these challenges, ancient populations were subjected to varying levels of influence of large-scale political entities such as the Inca Empire, and/or post-contact colonialism, which likely changed traditional subsistence patterns, community organization, and cultural practices. This project will investigate how individuals as well as communities were able to adapt in order to mediate the effects of environmental challenges and political/cultural changes. The proposed research will address questions surrounding how these challenges affected people's ability to subsist, how changes in political structure altered community organization and cultural practices (i.e. site usage and mortuary practices), and whether there were changes in population composition at the archaeological site of Marcajirca from the Late Intermediate Period (LIP) through the Early Colonial Period (ca. 1000-1640AD). The goal of this research is to complement the work of and provide valuable resources to local archaeologists who are beginning to construct a more detailed picture of human habitation in previously under-researched environments. Dr. Fehren-Schmitz and Mrs. Washburn will utilize a combination of stable isotope (Carbon and Nitrogen) and ancient DNA analysis in order to explore changes in socioeconomic and subsistence patterns. The use of either stable isotope analysis or aDNA can be seen in bio-archaeological projects throughout the Andes; however, it is not common practice to utilize a combination of both methodologies, which if not done has the potential to limit the scope of research projects because each set of data has usable limitations. By combining these two methodologies, this project can address questions of how environmental challenges and cultural/political stability or change ultimately affected community organization and daily life. Moreover, unlike other regions of South America, the under-representation of human aDNA data from within this region inhibits the ability to fully reconstruct South American population density, history and interaction, as well as the impact of European colonization. The data collected for this research will provide key information that will potentially shape fundamental understanding of long-term population development in the Andean highlands. 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.