ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the environments of the Ayacucho Basin. For the native Andean people of the Ayacucho Basin, neither the life zones of OAS, ONERN, or MacNeish's project are of great significance. John Holland of the University of Michigan has visualized the problem as a nested set of Markov processes with progressively coarser structure. One of the most ambitious attempts to classify the Peruvian Andes into a series of environmental zones was undertaken by the Organization of American States (OAS) during the 1950s, This effort culminated in an important monograph by Joseph Tosi, a work which utilized the classificatory methods of Leslie Holdridge and drew heavily on the pioneering botanical studies of Weberbauer (1945). The Mantaro desert, lowest zone in the area, occurs in the deep rain shadow of the Huanta region. The humid woodland must originally have been one of the richest faunal zones in the Ayacucho Basin.
