Throughout history, humans have obtained much of their food, fuel, and technological needs from the gathering of wild plants, horticulture, agriculture, and arboriculture. Certainly, animal products also have been important components of diet and cuisine , and there has been a recent push to integrate archaeobotanical and faunal datasets to gain fully robust understandings of past food ways . Prehispanic residents of north coastal Peru relied on two main domesticates, camelids and guinea pig, or cuy , and they also exploited white-tailed deer , rodents, small snakes, and lizards, as well as marine resources including marine otter , various near and off shore pelagic fish, sharks, rays, molluscs, and coastal seabirds such as cormorant and pelican , on the coast as well as in middle valley sites 1 . Regardless, the contribution of plant foods to Moche Valley diet was and remains substantial. While the abundance of certain plants in the archaeological record may be the result of differential preservation or ecological constraints, evidence of differential plant use between communities is often conditioned by cultural choices. For example, Morehart and Helmke’s comparison of archaeobotanical data from two Late Classic period Maya sites in the upper Belize Valley, an affluent plazuela group and a commoner farmstead, demonstrated that wood procurement and craft production were socially contingent—some households procured wood from the local environment while others obtained higher quality materials through trade, gifts, or tribute. These practices in turn impacted the organization of household labor, including gendered household tasks such as firewood collection. In addition to status, food selection is often enacted to preserve identity and tradition. In her ethnographic study of Salasacan food ways in the Ecuadorian Andes, Corr found that food informed local construction of personhood and Salasacan identity, in contrast to White/Mestizo identity. Contrasts between local/non-local, processed/natural, cultivated/store-bought, and Spanish/Indian foods served to strengthen individual as well as collective identities . In addition to the types and amounts of foods consumed,hydroponic nft system socially-constructed cuisine preferences can be archaeologically evident from distribution patterns across space.
As Hastorf highlights, ethnographic studies have shown that we can see differential spatial patterning of artifacts in storage contexts, food preparation loci, refuse disposal areas, and in or near domestic structures; such patterns are the result of habitual domestic practices. Archaeologists have successfully used spatial analysis of different contexts to examine the intersection of a variety of food-related activities with status, political economy, gender, ritual, and the public/private division . VanDerwarker and Detwiler’s analysis of Cherokee food ways from the Coweeta Creek site revealed that plant food processing took place near townhouses , complicating assumptions about gendered segregation of space in protohistoric Cherokee communities. Based on her analysis of faunal data from Neolithic Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, Twiss suggests that each household had separate private and communally advertised identities; whereas certain feast foods were placed publically to announce particular identities to others , quotidian food stores were placed out of sight in private storage rooms on the sides of individual houses. I discuss the intersection of food and social space further in Chapter 5. Silliman explicitly problematizes anthropological conceptions of labor, asserting that a useful definition places it in an economic framework encapsulated within social relations. Citing Wolf , Silliman draws on Marx’s distinction between work and labor: work represents the activities of individuals or groups expending energy to produce, but labor represents a social phenomenon, carried out by human beings bonded to one another in society. Labor’s significance for the anthropology of power and social relations is its ability to be appropriated and enforced as well as its varying impacts on men, women, and children in households and communities. Within prehistoric archaeology, labor primarily has been approached through studies of political economy , elite control of labor and surplus , and craft specialization . Studies in historic archaeology have addressed the relationships between conscripted labor and tribute, material life, and social relations in colonial households, missions, rancherias, and plantation settings.
Many traditional Andean societies considered the control of labor to be the foundation of social power, rather than possession of material wealth or commodities . With respect to the Inka, all categories of people were categorized into different classes on the basis of their productive capabilities. As described by chronicler Guaman Poma de Ayala , the Inka empire “separated the Indians into ten classes to be able to count them, in order that they were employed in work according to their capacity and that there were no idle people in this reign.” Given the emphasis on labor relations noted in the ethnographic and ethnohistoric literature in the Andes , a deeper consideration of ancient labor dynamics seems critical to understanding Andean political economies and shifts toward increasing sociopolitical complexity and inequality. In his studies of laborers in Franciscan mission contexts and Mexican California ranchos in Alta California, Silliman employs explicit practice-based approaches to labor . According to Silliman , labor is more than simply an economic or material activity; rather, it should be conceived of “as social action and as a mechanism, outcome, or medium of social control and domination.” As Hastorf illuminates, the “places where people complete daily tasks are the nexus of grumbling, confrontation, as well as celebration and awe.” Highlighting labor as practice considers how labor regimes are implemented and then carried out on a daily basis; how labor can be a highly routinized set of practices; and how labor tasks and scheduling are experienced bodily and socially. The procurement, production, processing, and consumption of plant foods in households and for larger community events certainly require a unique set of social practices that leave archaeological signatures. Hastorf outlines a range of labor activities related to these three elements of food ways, from production to processing to consumption. Production requires preparing soil, planting, fertilizing, mulching, recultivating, watering, weeding, and collecting/harvesting, all of which may require reaping, beating, plucking, uprooting, or furrowing, which often occurs more than once during a single growth cycle. Production activities require careful attention to seasonality and scheduling, with regards to planting, crop management/maintenance, and harvesting.
With the exception of seed storage, tool production, and the generation of domestic compost, activities related to production take place in fields or home gardens where crops are grown. Archaeologists rarely investigate fields themselves to find evidence of crop production ; rather, they make inferences about production activities based on patterns of field crops, tree crops/other fruits, and wild weed seeds that make their way back to domestic habitation sites. The issue of agricultural intensification looms large in this dissertation. Prehistoric agricultural intensification would have involved increased labor investment along the entire set of tasks associated with farming: canal construction and maintenance, terracing, fertilizing, weeding, mulching, harvesting, processing, etc. Ancient farmers would have paid strict attention to seasonality and scheduling of planting, tending, and harvesting; as a result, changes in agricultural rhythms associated with intensification would have conditioned daily practices related to crop production and processing. Processing relates to a range of activities associated with preparation for immediate consumption or storage, in addition to preparing plant parts for their use as shelter, containers, tools, clothing, and so forth . These activities include threshing, winnowing, milling, leaching, grinding, etc., along with cooking activities such as parching, roasting, toasting, boiling, baking, etc. Most of these activities take place within habitation areas and require the use of various material media as well as movement through various spaces, public and private, that provide opportunities for social interaction or restrictions on visibility and community integration . Archaeobotanical data can be used to indicate the spatial location of on-site processing activities , and can also inform on processing that occurs off-site, near fields at times of harvest. Consumption, the actual intake of foodstuffs, can be reflected in food preparation and cooking strategies . In the absence of direct evidence of consumption in the form of dental calculus, coprolites, or bone chemistry data, consumption practices can be inferred via food remains within hearths, types of cooking and serving vessels, heating techniques , starch grain residues and phytoliths on cooking vessels,nft channel and scatterings around hearths and middens where food was prepared and leftovers were discarded.
Some of the literature focused on the political economy of expansionist states considers the role of food in terms of household labor organization and gender hierarchies. Andean researchers have questioned whether state development implied increases in women’s labor and changes in women’s social status . Important approaches also have been developed in Mesoamerican scholarship for considering these issues . For example, Brumfiel argued that the Aztec state increased tribute demands on households, requiring family members to spend more timing engaging in labor away from the household. She argues that women’s labor investment in food processing increased with the shift from the cooking of stews and porridge to the preparation of portable but more time-consuming tortillas. Bray and Jennings outline the enormous labor input for chicha brewing, concluding that labor investment in chicha production would have been central to Andean leaders’ ability to organize large-scale feasts. Gero and Jennings and Chatfield suggest that large-scale feasting impacted women’s status, arguing that as feasting became more centralized and production more specialized, women lost control and influence formerly held through domestic production and distribution within a household’s social network. This labor endeavor had different consequences with respect to gender and status is terms of consumption as well. In several cases, including the Inka occupation of the Upper Mantaro Valley of central Peru , the Tiwanaku occupation of Moquegua in southern Peru , and the Gallinazo occupation of Cerro Oreja in the Moche Valley , bone chemistry studies and oral health indicators suggest that men had higher maize intakes, likely a result of participation in public commensal events involving chicha. In contrast, these differential consumption patterns led to poorer dental health for women; Andean scholars have reported gendered divisions of labor in which females are responsible for masticating maize kernels for chicha production, resulting in higher dental caries rates among women . In certain parts of the Andes and Amazon it has been documented ethnographically that to sweeten chicha, women chew the maize and spit the masticated mixture into the pot where the chicha is then boiled . These differences would not result in differences in male and female stable isotope ratios, as women were not necessarily consuming the maize; depending on the location in the Andes, chicha can be made from a variety of products, and chewing and spitting is not always part of the preparation. Based on her analysis of bioarchaeological data from the Salinar and Gallinazo burials from the site of Cerro Oreja in the Moche Valley, Gagnon suggests that the men of Cerro Oreja were increasingly drafted by elite into work parties where they were provisioned with meat or marine resources, whereas women and children tended agirucltural fields and consumed the staple crops they produced and processed, resulting in different gendered diets and dental health.Hastorf documents similar patterns in for the Sausa people under Inka hegemony in the Upper Mantaro Valley; stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic values suggest that while women were producing more chicha, only certain men in the Sausa community consumed maize in supra household community events, and men also had greater access to meat. While women increased their labor in terms of chicha preparation, they did not participate in supra household consumption. In the Andes, chicha drinking reinforces social hierarchies; social status is marked by the order in which one is served chicha, and whether one acts as giver or receiver . Dynamics in which women prepared and served chicha that was then consumed by men thus has implications for status as well as traditional gender roles in Andean societies. While a wealth of literature has been devoted to feasting, work parties, etc., less often considered in discussions of political expansion, gender, and labor is a consideration of everyday labor associated with farming, foraging, and processing of foodstuffs for daily household needs in addition to supra household community. Feasts and daily meals are not necessarily mutually exclusive —when distinguishing between feasts and daily meals, often it is not the type of plant that differs but the way in which it was prepared, presented, or combined with other foods, or in terms of the sheer quantity in which it was used and/or deposited.