River and Pampa: A Regional View of the Machaca Formative

Recently, Stone Spanish language instructor Maribel Perez had the honor to present research at The Society for American Archeology’s Annual Meeting. The Society for American Archeology seeks to lead the archaeological community by promoting research and dissemination of knowledge — this year’s 87th Annual Meeting was held in person in Chicago and Maribel’s paper was one of only a few hundred accepted submissions out of more than 2000. Today, Maribel shares with us a summary the research paper she presented at SAA:

I’ve always been interested in understanding the characteristics of the emergence of complex societies and their relationships with their environments in different ecological zones. I had the fortune to work at two culturally and ecologically different archaeological sites in Bolivia: Khonkho Wankane, an inland site located on the slopes of the Kimsachata’s mountainous chain, and Iruhito, on the banks of the Desaguadero River, south of Lake Titicaca. 

Nowadays, Khonkho Wankane and Iruhito are inhabited by Aymara and Uru communities respectively.  Both communities are culturally and linguistically different from each other, and have a long history of rivalry. Archaeologically, both sites are important because they present evidence of the initial formation of complex and unique societies. For example, in 2010 my colleague and I described evidence of multiple stages of ritual and processing human bones at Khonkho Wankane. This was a ritual center to which the dead were brought for processing and then removed for final burial. Likewise, our excavation revealed that for centuries these inland communities practiced an agropastoral economy; tubers, ancient grains such as quinoa, along with the usage of llamas as a source of transportation, protein, and wool, were key components of their pre-Hispanic domestic economy that endured for centuries.  

Today, inhabitants at Khonkho Wankane are trying to cope with the introduction of pesticides, climate change, and globalization. For example, the intensive production of quinoa for exportation is causing an ecological disequilibrium in that area. Ironically, the construction of the concept of superfood has sentenced to death some species of plants and animals, and thereby produced a radical change in the local economic and health systems of many Andean communities.

Since 2005, my research has expanded to a different site in another ecozone: Iruhito located along the Desaguadero River. For modern Uru, the river is more than just a source of food, it’s a sacred entity that represents their place of birth. It is a living entity to follow. So, one of the main goals of this research is to consider how a sense of attachment to place persists over very long periods of time - including periods of what seems to be extended abandonment. For my case study - concepts of reoccupation such as reactivation of place, revitalization, or reattachment to place, don’t seem to fit with my sense of the history of the site, nor with the sense of place communicated to me by my collaborators in Iruhito, who expressed a sense in which attachment to place perdured over periods of deoccupation. This draws me to reconsider common understandings in the archaeological literature of the nature of place. Instead of something stable, static, and rooted in the earth, I describe a sense of place that is stretched, fluid, dynamic, and which inheres in the water of the adjacent river. 

Our project has worked in the community over the past decade and half to reconstruct the long-term history with an eye toward understanding landscape and political relationships. Broadly speaking, we have documented roughly continuous occupation at Iruhito stretching back to the Middle Formative period between 800 and 200 BC. The site continued to be used during the Late Formative period between 200 BC and AD 500. But within this broad continuity are periods of seeming abandonment at the site. It is these periods of “hiatus” that drew me to think about the nature of place at Iruhito. 

After several excavation and lab-work seasons, we have an alternate hypothesis to explain the apparent contradiction between the continuity evident in the ceramic patterns and the long “hiatus” in occupation evident from the radiocarbon dates. At the time, our project was thinking about how climatic change in the past would have affected the community, questions that continue to be heavily debated in Titicaca basin archaeology. So, during an ethnographic study we asked members of the community: how did community members respond in the early 1940s when an uncommonly severe drought occurred? 

They responded simply that the community “followed the water” and their tone suggested that drought was not an issue that community members regularly worried about. They elaborated that as Qut suñi, or “people of the water”, the Uru have use-rights to contiguous areas of water, including all of the northern Desaguadero River and Lake Titicaca. 

Based on this ethnographic work we might hypothesize that residents at Iruhito left the site and moved north, following the water, to other locations, and then once again returned to reoccupy Iruhito. While this argument is of course, hypothetical, it does seem that the period of deoccupation at Iruhito, the “hiatus”, was a period characterized by a high degree of variation in rainfall, including a period of increasingly dry conditions leading up to deoccupation. The work reveals a period of high variability roughly coinciding with the “hiatus” at Iruhito, including a broad drying trend coinciding with the end of occupation.

Small changes in rainfall which raise or lower the level of the lake can have outsized effects on the river as experienced by people living alongside and within it. It is clear that small changes in rainfall can dramatically affect the characteristics of the environment experienced by people living there, even over relatively short periods of time. This is a dynamic waterscape that must have been rapidly changing during the Late Formative period. 

This explanation is, of course, hypothetical, and indeed, would be a difficult one to test. However, the idea prompts us to think about the relationship between past peoples and places. The notion of place that emerges from this analysis is very much rooted in the engagement of people with the physical world around them - with the water and extensive reed beds of the river.

A recent publication exploring the archaeology of detachment from place critiques the positive valence often associated with sedentism, suggesting that “periods of stasis may be highly unstable, in the long run, and that dynamic processes of making, unmaking, and remaking tend to typify the human experience more so than rootedness” (McAnany and Lamoureux-St-Hilaire 2020:21). I think this is a perceptive observation, and one that seems borne out by the evidence reviewed here. Indeed, the notion of place evident at Iruhito is one that is not fundamentally rooted in stasis, or even in earth, but rather in water.  And as such it is a notion of place that is just as dynamic as the movement of that water. 

Nowadays, Lake Titicaca and the Desaguadero river are heavily contaminated. For almost 3000 years these riverine communities were able to face natural environmental change and successfully survive. But now these bodies of water face irreversible change due to modern technology and the effects of global warming. For centuries, Urus have been constantly working in partnership with the river, following the levels of water. Today, this practice is no longer sustainable; lakes and rivers are either drying out, or contaminated. As a result, these communities are physically and culturally disappearing.

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