Archaeological survey in the Juli-Desaguadero region of Lake Titicaca Basin, Southern Peru / Charles Stanish, et al.

12. The Lake Titicaca Basin: A Precolumbian Built Landscape

“…Frost-resistant potatoes can be grown under certain conditions as high as 4,500 m, and herding settlements are found as high as 5,210 m (Bowman 1916 : 52, figure 24). The remains of agropastoral infrastructure such as residences, walls, corrals, and irrigation canals and large special-purpose sites (cemeteries and pukaras, or forts) are common west of the lake (Stanish et al 1997;Flores 1979 : 45 -50). Vegetation is annually burned off to improve grazing.…”

“…were located in a recent survey of the Ilave River drainage on the western side of Lake Titicaca (Klink and Aldenderfer 1996). Preceramic sites are rare in the immediate vicinity of the lake (Stanish et al 1997;Albarracín 1996 : 78 -79). By 4000 -3500 b.p., hunters and pastoralists were living in permanent settlements in the Ilave River drainage (Klink and Aldenderfer 1996).…”

“…Detailed historical documents of the Lupaca kingdom located in seven major towns on the western shore report that political leaders owned huge herds of llamas and alpacas and exercised control over tens of thousands of human subjects. The Lupaca political organization was based on a hierarchy of leadership, towns divided into upper and lower moieties, dense rural populations, and colonies established in distant lands to exploit nonlocal resources (Murra 1968;Stanish et al 1997;Graffam 1992). The Lupaca and their neighbors had inherited a rich landscape capital and sophisticated knowledge system from millennia of earlier farming peoples.…”

“…Another alternative to increase the labor pool involves multiple family residences, which may have been more common in the past (Isbell 1997b). The dispersed nature of rural settlement patterns in the Lake Titicaca Basin throughout prehistory suggests that farming households and communities attempted to locate residences near their fields (Albarracín and Mathews 1990; Stanish et al 1997;Albarracín 1996). Because of the practice of field scattering, farmers often maintain multiple residences (Goland 1991;Erickson n.d.).…”

“…Multiple residences for individual households or multiple agglutinated settlements for single communities throughout production zones make it difficult to define precisely all components of the individual households through traditional site survey. Local labor units may be reflected in house compounds (Isbell 1997b;Bermann 1994;Janusek 1994), settlement patterning in relation to intensity of agriculture (e.g., Stone 1996), residence location in reference to fields (Stanish et al 1997;Erickson n.d.), or the formal patterning of Precolumbian fields (Erickson 1993).…”