A Lesson in Applied Archaeology
Table of Contents- Part I: Introduction
- Part 2: Recreating Raised Field Agriculture
- Local and Extralocal Researchers
- A Bottom Up Perspective
- The First Experiments
- Part 3: Implications of the Research
- The Politics of Agriculture
- The Future of Applied Archaeology
- The Downside of Applied Archaeology
- Future Projects
- Spanish Language Version, Alvaro Higueras
Local and Extralocal Researchers
I wanted the new fields to be configured as close to the original forms as possible and to be planted in local crops that would have been available to the ancient farmers. Other than that, we could be flexible in re-learning how to farm raised fields. The Quechua farmers working with us provided plenty of innovative ideas. One innovation involved the organization of labor. We proposed that each community group participating on the project would organize work in the tradition of "minka," whereby every family sends an adult to participate in the cooperative project. We tried this but after several weeks of building fields, the more active members began complaining that the level of participation was uneven and some families were actually sending children as their representatives. They suggested using a "tarea" system ("task") whereby each family is assigned a set area of fields and canals to reconstruct. Under this organization, families could work at their own pace. Some individuals worked many days on their plots; others mobilized their extended family and completed their "tarea" in a couple of hours. Everyone considered the tarea method to be fair. The amount of effort and care put into constructing each family plot was variable with some field blocks well constructed and others less so. The irregular "modular" appearance of public construction can be seen in many pre-Columbian buildings, agricultural infrastructure, and earthworks throughout the Andean region, indicating that labor may have been organized by communities in a similar manner in the past.Other innovations suggested by the local farmers included building retaining walls of sod blocks to hold the platform soils until vegetation became established to protect the fragile field edges from collapse, planting winter wheat in the canals for a dry season crop, and the use of large homespun blankets to move loose soil from canal to platform.
I find the link between "tarea" labor and "modular" public architecture intriguing. Could you tell us more about it?
Archaeologists Michael Moseley and Chuck Hastings discovered this back in the 1970s when they were excavating at the Huaca del Sol, a large pyramid near Trujillo, Peru, built by a group of people referred to as the Moche. In their examination of a sample of the millions of adobe bricks used to construct the temple, Moseley and Hastings found that most bricks have what they referred to as "maker’s marks," a simple design or figure that was made on the surface before the bricks dried. Particular maker’s marks seemed to be associated with individual columns of bricks used to build the massive pyramid. They interpreted the modular construction to be the work of individual communities paying their "labor tax" to the Moche state and the maker’s marks were proof that the community had paid their tax (their version of a W-2 form!).
Archaeologists later found that many of the irrigation canals and aqueducts used by the Chimu peoples during late Peruvian prehistory were constructed in a similar modular fashion.
