They documented Old World cultigens, including wheat , barley , and peach , in a hearth associated with an usnu, or ceremonial platform, and suggest that those items were incorporated into changing ritual practices of the Hispanic-Indigenous period, although those foods were not recovered in other domestic contexts. Throughout the period of Spanish conquest, a common cultural exchange that occurred between Europeans and Indigenous peoples involved food, especially cultigens. Jamieson and Sayre’s recovery of barley and quinoa from eighteenth century artisan households from a marginal neighborhood in Riobamba in highland Ecuador suggests that lower-class households consumed both Old World and New World domesticates. They argue that indigenous highlanders may have readily adopted barley, an Old World cultigen, as the grain would have fit well into existing food-processing systems and grain-based cuisine that included quinoa . While the impact of European contact on native subsistence systems has been a prominent theme in historic archaeology in North America , historic archaeology in the Andes has been more limited . Aside from ritual offerings themselves, paleoethnobotanists have examined the settings in which ritual events took place—namely, feasting, including memorial feasting as well as feasting that was more explicitly tied to the political economy . Many scholars have emphasized the political and economic roles of prominent types of ritual negotiation—feasts—in creating and reinforcing power and status differences. However, scholars are now questioning the simple association between the emergence of social hierarchies and food production linked to status competition occurring in the context of feasting. Rather than having a causal role in the emergence of social hierarchies,led grow lights changes in plant food cultivation likely were embedded in the changing social relations that eventually led to the development of those hierarchies.

Across the world and through time, while many groups certainly engaged in hierarchical negotiations involving food ways to emphasize power or status differences, others likely participated in commensal events that reinforced shared group identities and traditions . Neither scenario is mutually exclusive; attempts at increasing solidarity within communities and emphasizing differences among its members through commensal activities likely happened simultaneously in the formation of early complex societies, including early Andean polities. Some recent scholarship in the Andes has moved away from ideas of food production as an economic foundation for accumulation on the part of leaders,and instead favors views of community events and the ritual significance of food in the formation of sociopolitical inequalities. At the site of Buena Vista in the Chillón Valley of central Peru, Duncan et al. discuss macro and micro-botanical remains from the Fox Temple, a special purpose ritual feature that dates to ca. 2200 B.C. In addition to a diverse suite of macrobotanical remains, gourd and squash artifacts yielded starch grains of manioc , potato , chili pepper , arrowroot , and mesquite, or algarrobo . The authors argue that these remains likely represent refuse from small feasting events. In the Preceramic period , multiple small-scale construction events appear to have been preceded by feasting rituals hosted by informal leaders who lacked the social power to organize large amounts of labor for more massive building events. Drawing on work by Vega-Centeno,they argue that the limited and weakly formalized leadership of this time needed to be constantly reinforced through ritual practices or events. For the Tiwanaku polity of western Bolivia and southern Peru, Goldstein argues that there were no specialized chicha brewing facilities , and that the distribution of keros, the emblematic Tiwanaku serving vessel, indicates that feasting was organized at an ayllu-like level and not at the grandiose large scale of Inka state feasting. In this view, chicha consumption, including amongst Tiwanaku colonies, contributed to the development of community cohesion and a panregional identity across areas that had previous lacked unifying features, including the Atacama region, the Azapa Valley, Cochabamba, and Moquegua.

In all of these areas, ceramic assemblages for making and consuming chicha are associated with Tiwanaku expansion and came to predominate over open-mouth pots more suited for the preparation of stews. The adoption of chicha at the household level, using Tiwanaku drinking vessels and designs, signals the depth of Tiwanaku influence as it affected commoners’ daily practices instead of being restricted to feasting or elite contexts . Recent research also questions assumptions about the role of maize as an important element of ritual practice within emerging political institutions. Microbotanical analyses by Zarillo et al. suggest that maize was initially used as ritual beverage, rather than a quickly-intensified staple, at the Early Formative/Valdivia period Real Alto site on the Santa Elena Peninsula of coastal Ecuador as early as 3350 B.C. They argue that subsistence change was slow and gradual, rejecting the idea that political competition framed early food production. Recent macro and microbotanical analyses of early maize remains from Paredones and Huaca Prieta, Peru by Grobman and colleagues also lend support to the argument that maize was not a staple food in the Preceramic period . These new findings are significant in that they cast doubt on previous scenarios that consider food production to always be orchestrated by politically savvy elites—rather, political consolidations and social inequalities may have emerged from rituals practiced within traditionally accepted parameters that eventually reached exaggerated scales. Moving beyond the emergence of social hierarchies, other studies continue to draw more explicitly on political economy approaches for understanding changes in plant foodways and social differentiation. Archaeologists typically have examined political economies in terms of class relations, surplus production, and the financing of political institutions. Some Andean models of political economy posit that inequalities resulted as differential control of canals and irrigated land was exploited by elites as a means to co-opt the labor of others, generating agricultural surpluses to achieve power and participate in exchange networks with other communities and ethnic groups ; however, these assumptions largely remain untested with direct subsistence data.

One of the most important contributions of paleoethnobotanical data to understanding shifts in political economy in the Andes is Hastorf’s classic case of how the Inka interfered with the local political economy of the Sausa people of the Upper Mantaro River Valley of central Peru. Hastorf’s analysis of plant data from Sausa house floors dating both prior and subsequent to Inka control revealed a shift in plant diet for local elites and non-elites. Prior to Inka domination, elite and non-elite status was clearly marked in plant foodways; the shift to imperial control, however, led to a leveling of local status differences. Hastorf and colleagues extend their analysis to wood use as well, noting a change in wood use that indicates restriction in access, tending, or trade of fuel resources by the local indigenous inhabitants under Inka rule. Goldstein et al. discuss labor extraction in relation to molle chicha production at the Wari site of Cerro Baul in Moquegua . They argue that outside of Wari elite contexts, the local population was not engaged in producing chicha for their own consumption, but that chicha primarily played a role in organizing and legitimizing elite activities, perhaps including the extraction of labor from nonelite households. Their examination of molle remains departs from the traditional emphasis on maize chicha that has dominated the Andean literature for decades note, “paleoethnobotanists excel at diachronic analyses of plant data, synchronic comparisons of different sites/regions, and the use of diverse quantitative techniques, from basic standardizing measures to complex multivariate statistics.” It is still the rare study, however, that examines variability in plant remains from different contexts within a single site , although such an approach has the potential to inform about the organization of food preparation, processing, storage, and disposal, as well as issues of site formation and feature function. Hastorf’s study of Inka conquest, food ways, and gender represents a seminal case of the spatial distribution of plant remains and gender, and is also a key paper that pushed paleoethnobotany toward social archaeology in the first place—drawing on such approaches has good potential for evaluating the organization of Moche Valley society. Understandings of domestic labor,vertical grow system including food preparation and consumption, can shed light on elements of social reproduction and inequalities in daily life that are often downplayed in large-scale, structural histories . By studying the material remains of food ways, this dissertation contributes to further understandings of the diverse social strategies enacted by both highland and coastal groups that profoundly influenced ancient sociopolitical development along the Peruvian north coast. A drought-resistant plant,Trujillo coca probably originated from the adaptation of Huánuco coca to drier habitats.The best growing conditions include hill-slope planting in friable soil, good drainage, and ample shade; coca plants can be harvested 18 months from the time of planting.

A mild stimulant and analgesic, coca is used to combat altitude sickness; assuage fatigue; stave off hunger and thirst; and relieve headaches, stomach aches, and joint pain. Dried coca leaves are chewed , or are steeped in water to make a tea. Coca tea is consumed commonly in the Andean highlands today as a means to prevent altitude sickness, but coca leaves are chewed broadly in coastal and middle valley communities, particularly by day laborers. While prehistoric remains of coca are rarely uncovered by archaeologists or positively identified by paleoethnobotanists because of their fragile nature , Dillehay et al. provide evidence for coca chewing as early as 6050 B.C. in the Nanchoc Valley, Peru, and tie its use to emerging specialists who extracted and supplied calcite and lime to communities for coca chewing during the transition from mobile hunting and gathering to sedentary farming.Indeed, fully domesticated common beans were recovered from deposits in Guitarrero Cave in the Callejón de Huaylas, Ancash, Peru, dated to 6050 B.C. .Common beans were domesticated independently in Mexico as well as the Andes;Andean beans have larger seeds, but Mexican cultivars are better suited to hotter climates.According to Hastorf , beans were the most common crop in coastal Preceramic sites from 6000 to 4200 B.C., eventually becoming widespread throughout the coastal region by the Initial Period . On the Peruvian north coast, beans have been recovered from the earliest levels at the Preceramic component of Huaca Prieta in the Chicama Valley and from the Initial Period site of Gramalote in the Moche Valley . Because beans are highly susceptible to taphonomic processes and consumed in their entirety, the archaeological presence of beans is actually quite remarkable. Common beans are also prominent in the Moche artistic canon . High in protein, common beans are well known comestibles, frequently added to soups and stews, but also have documented medicinal uses, as a diuretic, as an analgesic, to dissolve tumors, and to stabilize menstruation. After beans are harvested, stalks can be used as fodder. Beans tolerate most environmental conditions in tropical and temperate zones, and germinate rapidly at soil temperatures above 18°C. Seed rates are 20–115 kg/ha depending on seed size and row width . Beans are frequently cultivated with maize for their nitrogen-fixing properties; indeed, in Latin America today, ca. 70 percent of beans are inter planted with maize in commercial fields . With maize, beans are usually planted 5–8 cm deep, deep enough to give good coverage and sufficient moisture to promote fast germination and growth. Intercropping Phaseolus beans with maize provides benefits to both plants . VanDerwarker notes that in addition to enriching the growth and yield of maize plants, Phaseolus beans complement maize in terms of nutritional value; maize is deficient in essential amino acids lysine and isoleucine, which beans have in abundance. As a result, eating beans with maize together would have provided benefits as well as cropping beans and maize together. Lima bean/pallaris another Phaseolus species broadly cultivated in the coast and highlands, with a great antiquity of domestication . Like the common bean, there were two independent centers of domestication of lima bean, with smaller varieties domesticated in Mesoamerica and larger varieties domesticated in coastal Peru. Although lima beans are primarily grown for consumption , some medicinal uses include the treatment of styes and smallpox . Like the common bean, lima beans do not require much water for cultivation, and often are intercropped with maize for their nitrogen-fixing properties.