The Origins of Ranked Society in the Northern Titicaca Basin

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With National Science Foundation support Dr. Charles Stanish and his colleagues will continue their work studying the role of trade in the development of the first complex societies in the high Andes. Over the past 15 years, this American and Peruvian research team led by Stanish has uncovered a circuit of over major 80 prehistoric settlements, some dating back more than 4,000 years, along a trade route that is still in use today. The systematic, scientific analysis of these ancient sites reveals the role of trade in the origins of state societies and urban life in this part of the world. Using theories developed in anthropology and economics, this work will assess the degree to which trade between the high plains in the Andes and the Amazon basin was a primary factor in the rise of the first state society in the area, known as Pucara. Pucara flourished from ca. 400 BC to AD 300. For years, archeologists have debated why people stopped the very successful hunting and gathering lifeways of biologically modern humans that lasted for over 100,000 years and, in a very short period of time, developed agriculture, towns, and cities, the hallmarks of human civilization as we know it. This phenomenon occurred independently in only a handful places on the earth, including the Andes where this project is based. This comparative scientific research provides some clues as to how human urban societies, in the past and today, evolved and thrived in environmentally and politically challenging conditions. This archaeological work not only helps us recover the lost cultural heritage of the earth and illustrates the great achievements of native Americans, but it provides guideposts for modern economic development. From agricultural systems to modern transportation networks, these archaeological data define the successful adaptations of people in the past, adaptations that represent optimal land use strategies that evolved over millennia. Combined with independent paleoclimate research also supported by NSF, these data provide a rich view of environmental change and human adaptation at a macroregional level. Such data can, and are, used to guide future development in the region. Stanish uses regional archaeological methodologies to define the prehistoric patterns of land use. Using GPS technologies, low altitude photography, and intensive ground-truthing, the entire range of prehistoric settlements can be discovered in the region. With private support from the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, Stanish and his team use a variety of analytical techniques, such as obsidian sourcing, neutron activation analyses, and enhanced GIS mapping to define the cultural adaptations in the region over several millennia. This work brings together US and Peruvian specialists in archaeology and geography to conduct an integrated, systematic, and long-term research program. It will directly deal with the origins of complex society in this part of the world while contributing to our global data base on the political and economic structure of archaic states. These data, in turn, will be used to create, test, and refine models of early state development, maintenance, and collapse.