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
A Bottom Up Perspective
Isn’t the construction and maintenance of large public monuments an example of a "top-down approach" that apparently worked in the past? Were the laborers coerced by their rulers to do the work?The prehistory of Andean civilizations is full of examples of monumental constructions of mud brick and rock. Andean peoples paid their taxes in labor (mit’a) to the state, the state religion, local chiefs, and local shrines. Every citizen was expected to contribute their labor for a set amount of time each year. Sure, there was probably a certain amount of veiled threats or coercion involved. From the eyewitness accounts and from the archaeological record of the Inka, we know that these events were festive occasions where the "host" (the state or local chief) provided plenty of food, drink, and sometimes music for the workers. In some accounts, the workers were given fine gifts of cloth and exotic goods from distant lands.
Archaeologists have always assumed that big buildings must mean lots of labor and some form of leadership to mobilize the workers and tell them what to do. Archaeologists favoring the top-down approach, insist that farmers won’t work harder than what is necessary to put food on the table unless forced to do so by leaders or the state. However, recent discoveries indicate that the earliest monuments appeared on the coast and highlands of Peru between 5000 and 3000 years ago and were probably built by local communities long before state forms of government were established. Today, these are monuments to what Andean communities can accomplish based on their knowledge of engineering and ability to get people to work for local projects.
Sites with big buildings are the stuff that archaeologists have traditionally studied. The labor that went into big sites such as Chan Chan, Cuzco, or Machu Picchu is certainly impressive. But, I would argue that the labor for these monumental sites becomes insignificant when compared to the labor that many generations of farmers put into terraces, sunken gardens, raised fields, walls, roads, and pathways to create the cultural landscapes of the Andes. The landscape becomes a monument to the ingenuity of communities from a "bottom-up perspective."
