The Central Andes were the home of the Incas, an ancient civilization who created an enormous empire, larger in area than the Roman empire. Only indigenous peoples of the Himalayas have adapted as well as the native Andeans to high mountain environments. The ancestors of the Incas arrived in the Central Andes as nomadic hunters and gatherers perhaps 15,000 years ago. They began agro-pastoral lifeways (camelid herding and plant cultivation) around 8000 years ago. Many of the contemporary man-nature relationships can first be identified as developing during that period.
An essentially treeless grassland—the Ecuadorian paramo, the Peruvian puna, the Bolivian altiplano, and the Argentine salt puna—which is the home of the native herders and sierra farmers, occurs along the upper slopes, plateaus, and tablelands of the Andean mountain chain. Because similar elevations support trees elsewhere in the world, the question is raised: why is the zone treeless today? Is it because of the elevation and low temperature regimes currently extant? Is it because of a past climate shift? Is it because of human agency?
A popular theory is that somehow the native people destroyed the trees through mismanagement. However, pollen samples prove that these areas were significant grasslands long before any substantial human settlements existed. They supported large herds of wild camelids—guanaco and vicuña—whose subsequent domestic relatives—llama and alpaca—were the basis of the first Andean civilizations and continue to be economically important today.
On the other hand, one cannot deny significant and extensive impact on the landscape by the humans and their domestic animals. Overgrazing has resulted in decrease in palatable species; an increase in thorny and woody bushes, cacti, and less palatable grass species like ichu [1] and an increase in plants toxic to grazing animals. Annual or semi-annual burning of pastures to provide new growth for herds has also resulted in changes in plant assemblages, as it removes trees and other woody plants. Cutting trees and woody plants for fuel has further increased deforestation of the small refuge zones where trees persisted. In the presence of grazing pressure from domestic camelids, the tree species usually cannot regenerate. Grazing pressure and human agro-pastoral activities have depressed the tree line on the eastern slopes of the Andes.
Human activities thus have markedly impacted the local environment since the first major presence of human groups in the high Andes, but the presence of extensive treeless areas pre-dates the colonization of this area by humans. Thus, while human activities are clearly very important in the present configuration, the contributions from the wild herds of guanaco and vicuña which preceded the humans must also be an important factor in the occurrence of these grasslands, as well as that of elevation and meteorological conditions.
The domestic llama and alpaca herds were critical for survival of several highland groups. They provided meat, fat, blood for food; wool for clothing, bags, and rope; leather for footgear and equipment; bones for tools and religious items; dung for fertilizer and fuel; and labor power as caravan animals carrying trade goods. They also served as ‘banks on the hoof’, resources which could be mobilized for emergencies during the irregularly occurring but not infrequent environmental catastrophes such as sustained droughts, unseasonal frosts, and the like.
Risk and uncertainty also contributed to reliance on extra-somatic sources of help as well. The gods responsible for protecting the flocks and for insuring their increase were believed to dwell among the surrounding peaks. Annual ceremonies, called pagos, from the Spanish verb ‘to pay’, were held to ‘pay’ the gods for current success and to petition for the future increase of flocks. A male and female animal were selected from the herds, fed chicha, the local corn beer [2] and ‘married’ to begin the next season’s offspring. These llamas and alpacas were treated and thought of as kinfolk of the herders. Today these ancient fertility ceremonies have been conflated with Catholic rituals, and are held during Carnival. Often small illa or animal figures of the desired type of animal are blessed and buried with offerings. In Inca times these were sometimes gold and silver, while today they are ceramic, stone, or tin [3].
Plant agriculture was an exceedingly risky undertaking at this elevation; folklore suggests that crop failure occurred as often as 25 to 35 percent of the years. Andean people thus sought to reduce agricultural risk through a variety of strategies. Because rains could fall on one field but not on another a kilometer away, or because early frosts or late freezes could hit a valley bottom one time, but a high slope another time, the farmer might own two dozen or more small plots, scattered over several elevations, in several micro-environmental areas. Every farmer maintained a dozen or so varieties each of potatoes and other seed plants, because in one year a tuber which thrived in dry soils would be the only one to produce, in another year a variant which thrived in moist soils excelled, and in a third year a variety which did well in saltier soils yielded best.
In addition to the procedures to manage risk in maintaining biodiversity among their crops, the local residents developed other strategies as well to cope with risk. Elaborate freeze-drying techniques were employed to produce dehydrated potatoes, chuño [4] and other tubers. These technological procedures served two purposes: enhancing palatability and providing storable surplus. Most of the high elevation plants grown for consumption had significant quantities of phytotoxins, making them poor choices for foodstuffs until various dehydration processes removed the phytochemicals. As a serendipitous byproduct, the resulting detoxified tubers could be stored up to twenty years, providing a critical component of sustainability.
Herders often provided a necessary component of this detoxification process, as in following their herds, they located ‘salt’ or mineral licks with various comestible earths. They collected these geophageous clays and traded them with agriculturalists. These clays were fabricated into sauces to consume with meals. Residual phytotoxins in the tubers which had not been removed by dehydration processes, freeze-drying or by cooking became bound with the clays. In addition, bioavailable minerals were exchanged, thus doubly enhancing the quality of the food.
Propitiation of the resident gods for plants was as important as it was for the herd animals. The deity known as Pachamama (earth mother) was responsible for providing plant foods for the humans. Proper behavior involved offering a few coca leaves or other items before planting the field, much more substantial rituals at the harvest, and practices in daily life such as always decanting a few drops ‘for Pachamama’ each time one took a drink, thus attempting ritually to insure adequate moisture for the crops.
Andean farmers developed a series of strategies to modify the landscape to control nature, particularly moisture and temperature parameters. Andean peoples did not simply adapt to the ambient conditions—they were active agents who shaped and created Andean environments, and who transformed and built the landscape in which they lived.
The Lake Titicaca basin is an excellent example of the variety and range of practices employed. The local farmers, who practice small-scale intensive agriculture, make capital improvements to their lands, which are inherited by their descendants. The current elaborate landscape patterns are thus the result of multiple small increments accumulated for millennia. The flat plains usually were poorly drained; they suffered from too much water in the rainy season and too little in the dry season.
The local agro-pastoralists constructed raised fields systems or waru-waru [5] and sunken smaller garden patches or qochas [6] to address these problems. Construction of raised, ridged fields, with swales or canals between the ridges, resulted in ridge top areas above the waterlogged soils in the rainy season, eliminating rot among the tubers. Both the qocha system and the intervening canals among the raised fields trapped rainwater, which was curated through the dry season to provide a continuing water supply.
In addition to managing moisture, these systems also ameliorated temperature extremes. Thus the raised field patterns, and furrows in the qochas, were constructed either parallel to, or perpendicular to, the path of the sun, an orientation which permitted maximum solar energy capture by the water. This water kept the fields slightly warmer at night, and often radiated enough heat to prevent frost damage while the surrounding unmodified grasslands suffered heavy freezes.
While this technology was employed through the Inca period, European invaders brought the horse and plow (and in this century, the tractor). Raised fields could not be plowed efficiently by European technology, and hence they were leveled. Although Western technology permits much less labor per unit area, and thus is more efficient in that sense, the productivity per unit area has fallen off.
Anthropologists have recently reconstructed experimental raised fields in the Titicaca basin. These fields provide both increased yields and decreased environmental risk: local seed growing without any high-tech inputs have produced two to four times more per unit than crops growing on the European-style fields. On more than one occasion, unusually severe, out-of-season frosts have destroyed all the crops in the plowed flat fields, but have at worse only inflicted a little freeze damage on plant tops in the raised fields. While more labor intensive, the original indigenous technology has proved superior to Western technology in these environmental circumstances.
In addition to the raised fields and qochas, other landscape modifications were constructed to provide the same kinds of soil improvement and nutrient capture, erosion control, microclimate control, and moisture control or water management. Most noted among these are the stone-faced terraces or andenes [7] and irrigated pastures or bofedales [8]. For example, among the local hills, as well as the mountain valleys elsewhere in the Central Andes, often only the valley bottoms or hill bases had adequate moisture for crops, but because cold air is heavier and settles to the lowest areas, these same locations had the greatest risk from frosts. Elaborate terrace systems were constructed, with water provided by extensive canal networks. Thus hill slopes initially too steep to be plowed were remade into a myriad of small, level, irrigated plots. Because they were along the lower and middle valley/hillslope flanks, they were too low for high elevation freezes but above the pools of super-cooled air that collected on the valley bottoms. Thus agricultural terraces were often frost-free during most of the growing season.
Irrigated pastures (bofedales) were another means of managing water and temperature for the alpaca and llama herds. While llamas are more like camels in their ability to secure nutrition from high cellulose and other less palatable forage, alpacas thrive on moister, softer vegetation varieties. The neonates of both species are vulnerable to low temperatures in the first few days after birth. Herders thus developed elaborate canals and check dam systems, to bring water into suitable low-lying areas, where artificial rather swampy irrigated pastures (bofedales) were created. The lush environment created optimal fodder for the alpacas, and the ponds provided heat-sinks to ameliorate nearby temperatures on cold nights.
The modification of the environment is exhibited in multiple other ways as well. Rivers and streams have been channelized, artificial canals have been constructed, springs have been enlarged and improved, and various holding ponds and reservoirs have been constructed. Various causeways, roads and paths lead to constructed villages, defensive retreats (pucaras), cemeteries, shrines, and monuments. Fields are marked off by stone walls; large rock piles are scattered among the landscape, some for agricultural reasons and others for religious purposes. Stone corrals are found at various elevations. The Andean peoples of the Titicaca basin thus extensively transformed the local environment; such transformation is typical throughout the Central Andes.
Various strategies were employed in agro-pastoral production zones to provide the structure and rules for the allotment of irrigation water, distribution of communal and individual land, regulation of land use, scheduling of agricultural activities, definition of crop types, and cycle of rotational fallow. Included in these was the development and maintenance of high biodiversity among crops suited for a wide range of environments.
The Andean peoples often anthropomorphized their environment. The indigenous concept known (in Aymara) as taypi structures part of the human relationship with nature. Taypi physically is the center between two opposing concepts, the point of necessary convergence where the cosmological centrifugal forces that permit differentiation exists simultaneously with the centripetal force that ensures their mediation. It is thus both an integrating and separating center. The human body is divided into three components, with the taypi integrating center the heart and stomach. The cosmos is divided into an upper world, this world, and a lower world, with the earth as the mediating point between the upper and lower world. Hence humans, as residents of this earth, arbitrate not only between forces of good and evil, but also serve to mediate between the natural environment and the gods. Just as the human body is animated and integrated as a whole by an exchange of fluid elements (blood circulating, water drunk and expelled, air inhaled and exhaled), so too is nature. Analogies are made between the circulation of fluids to animate humans and the circulation of fluids to animate nature.
The human imagery overlay upon nature is even extended to the organization of some of the Andean groups. One of the mechanisms employed to deal with the environmental risks is to spread humans over the landscape, in a pattern similar to the spreading of fields discussed above. Thus a village might send family members up to a new hamlet in the herding zones, or down to lower elevation corn growing areas, spreading production risk so that in case there was complete failure in one zone, the community would have direct access to resources in other environmental zones because they had residents living there. In the case of one group from the Qollawaya, the settlements in the lower, middle, and upper ecological zones were conceptualized and referred to by terms of the human body, with the middle elevation home village thus seen as the heart and vitalizing component of the group, and the landscape itself as replicating the human body. Andeans hence perceive their lifeways as essentially harmonious with and replicating nature.
The environment thus is a dynamic, historically contingent component of the Central Andes. The Andean peoples did not simply adapt themselves passively to ambient ecological conditions. Rather they were active agents in the creation, shaping, and transformation of a highly patterned, artificial landscape.
REFERENCES
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