ABSTRACT
Plants participate in political processes at many levels: civic, ceremonial, ritual, as well as daily practice, creating and recreating the world that people perceive and live in through the meals that are prepared and eaten, the tools that are produced and used, the kin groups that exist across the landscape. Through plant patterns in the archaeological record, archaeologists can identify cultural activities. In this chapter, I shall look at the onset of agriculture and the entrance of crop use seen archaeologically along the west coast of Peru with a focus on the tempo of uptake of foreign crops. With that evidence, I shall explore what plant use might illustrate about the social dynamics in these early sedentary groups. I will use the example of Peruvian coastal plant data, spanning the time of the first plants up to the evidence for the political developments of the Early Horizon. The dates and traditional phase names span the Preceramic and the Initial Phases:
The greater Andean region of South America is considered one of the centres of premodern civilization. This area includes modern Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile and north-west Argentina. It lies along the main spine of the South American continental mountain range. It is notable for its diverse environmental zones that can be very close together. The area this study focuses on is the Peruvian coast, along hundreds of kilometres of very dry coastline. Many scholars describe this long time-span there, like the Neolithic in Europe, as a unified, homogeneous cultural and economic trajectory. But, looking at this time-span from another angle, I think we can see diversity in this sequence that illustrates the growth and maintenance of cultural identities as well as the values of the plants that were farmed.
