In recent years, scholars have emphasized the need for more holistic subsistence analyses, and collaborative publications towards this endeavor have become more numerous in the literature. However, there are relatively few attempts to qualitatively integrate zooarchaeological (animal) and paleoethnobotanical (plant) data, and even fewer attempts to quantitatively integrate these two types of subsistence evidence. Given the vastly different methods used in recovering and quantifying these data, not to mention their different preservational histories, it is no wonder that so few have undertaken this problem. Integrating Zooarchaeology and Paleoethnobotany takes the lead in tackling this important issue by addressing the methodological limitations of data integration, proposing new methods and innovative ways of using established methods, and highlighting case studies that successfully employ these methods to shed new light on ancient foodways. The volume challenges the perception that plant and animal foodways are distinct and contends that the separation of the analysis of archaeological plant and animal remains sets up a false dichotomy between these portions of the diet. In advocating qualitative and quantitative data integration, the volume establishes a clear set of methods for (1) determining the suitability of data integration in any particular case, and (2) carrying out an integrated qualitative or quantitative approach.

The third volume in the Andean Archaeology series, this book focuses on the marked cultural differences between the northern and southern regions of the Central Andes, and considers the conditions under which these differences evolved, grew pronounced, and diminished. This book continues the dynamic, current problem-oriented approach to the field of Andean Archaeology that began with Andean Archaeology I and Andean Archaeology II. Combines up-to-date research, diverse theoretical platforms, and far-reaching interpretations to draw provocative and thoughtful conclusions.

Growing the Taraco Peninsula is an examination of long-term human-environmental interactions through agriculture among Indigenous communities of the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia, located on the shores of Lake Titicaca in the Andes. Maria Bruno weaves together ethnographic observations of modern-day Aymara farming practices with an in-depth study of archaeological remains, particularly plants, to examine the development of agricultural landscapes through time. Beginning with the first small-scale communities of the Formative period (1500 BCE–500 CE) through the development of the Tiwanaku state (500–1100 CE), Bruno draws upon ethnographic insights from modern-day Indigenous farming practices on the peninsula as well as archaeological evidence from excavations at four sites to explore the landscapes and human-plant relationships that Taraco communities created through their agricultural practices. Through evaluation of environmental data on climate and land-use dynamics—rainfall, lake level, and soil character and distribution—she proposes a new hypothesis of how raised-field agriculture may have emerged in the region. With a detailed analysis of foodways at the Kala Uyuni site, her study reveals how Indigenous Taraco communities sustainably incorporated crops and wild plants into their daily and special-occasion meals, connecting the agricultural landscapes to local and regional social and political dynamics. Bringing together several indicators of the region’s long-term history and demonstrating that shifts in agriculture do not neatly correspond to the changes traditionally highlighted by archaeological culture histories, Growing the Taraco Peninsula reveals Indigenous landscape creation through farming on the Taraco peninsula as a critical example of sustainability. This valuable contribution to Andean archaeology is also of interest to scholars, students, and the general reader concerned about the environment, sustainable farming, sustainability, Andean history, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Sustainable Lifeways addresses forces of conservatism and innovation in societies dependent on the exploitation of aquatic and other wild resources, agriculture, and specialized pastoralism. The volume gathers specialists working in four areas of the world with significant archaeological and paleoenvironmental databases: West Asia, the American Southwest, East Africa, and Andean South America, and contributing to research in three broad time scales: long term (spanning millennia), medium term (archaeological time, spanning centuries or a few thousand years), and recent (ethnohistoric or ethnographic, spanning years or decades). By bringing an archaeological eye to an examination of human response to unpredictable environmental conditions, informed by an understanding of contemporary traditional peoples, the contributors to this volume develop a more detailed picture of how societies perceive environmental risk, how they alter their behavior in the face of changing conditions, and under what challenges the most rapid and far-reaching changes in adaptation have taken place. Sustainable Lifeways enhances our understanding of both the forces of conservatism and innovation which may have been in play in major transitions in the past, such as the development of complex society, and the expansions of early empires. Studies present examples of cattle herders in East Africa, hunter-gatherers and pastoralists in the Levant, South American fisher/farmers, and farmer/hunters of the U.S. Southwest.

This volume, the second in a series of studies on the archaeology of the Titicaca Basin, serves as an excellent springboard for broader discussions of the roles of ritual, authority, coercion, and the intensification of resources and trade for the development of archaic states worldwide. Over the last hundred years, scholars have painstakingly pieced together fragments of the incredible cultural history of the Titicaca Basin, an area that encompasses over 50,000 km2, achieving a basic understanding of settlement patterns and chronology. While large-scale surveys will need to continue and areas will need to be revisited to further refine chronologies and knowledge of site-formation processes, the maturation of the field now allows archaeologists to fruitfully invest energy in single locations and specialized topics.

This book is a study of the ways places are created and how they attain meaning. Smith presents archaeological data from Khonkho Wankane in the southern Lake Titicaca basin of Bolivia to explore how landscapes were imagined and constructed during processes of political centralization in this region. In particular he examines landscapes of movement and the development of powerful political and religious centers during the Late Formative period (200 BC–AD 500), just before the emergence of the urban state centered at Tiwanaku (AD 500–1100). Late Formative politico-religious centers, Smith notes, were characterized by mobile populations of agropastoralists and caravan drovers. By exploring ritual practice at Late Formative settlements, Smith provides a new way of looking at political centralization, incipient urbanism, and state formation at Tiwanaku.