A Lesson in Applied Archaeology
Table of Contents- Part I: Introduction
- Part 2: Recreating Raised Field Agriculture
- 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
The Politics of Agriculture
I’ve had the opportunity to periodically return to Peru since our project ended in 1986. I have been impressed by the number and scale of recently constructed raised fields. My colleagues at PIWA, a Peruvian group that promotes raised field agriculture and conducts agronomic investigations of the technology, showed me several huge blocks of community fields built by Aymara farmers south of Puno. On the other hand, I was shocked to find so many raised fields that had been rehabilitated by our project and later projects lying abandoned. We wanted to find out why some farmers adopted raised fields and others rejected them. Farmers are often pressed for time and lack the labor necessary to build and maintain raised fields. Migratory labor often takes adults out of the communities for years at a time. One interesting conclusion was that most of the fields that were being abandoned were large-scale community fields. Infighting and lack of cooperation among participants had fragmented many groups. We also found that many of the abandoned fields had been constructed on private property, "loaned" by its owner for communal projects. Once the owner discovered that the fields were highly productive, he took over the fields but couldn’t maintain them. Most of the development groups working in the rural areas of the Andes withdrew their support of projects during the period of bitter violence and civil unrest in Peru during the late 80s and early 90s.There appears to be much more success with individual families than communities. Circling the airport while flying into Juliaca in 1989, we noticed hundreds of small raised field plots adjacent to family farms in the pampas surrounding Huatta. Many of these family raised fields were built by farmers who did not receive the incentives given to promote raised field rehabilitation at the community level. These farmers had seen the community fields, some had even participated in the communal rehabilitation, and decided to try it on their own. If there is a future for raised fields, it is probably at the level of the individual farm family. Grassroots development with individual farmer’s deciding what to adopt seems to have more success than the top-down approaches favored by many government and non-government organizations who have chosen to focus their efforts at the level of community.
What kinds of public support for raised field agriculture have been developed in the region?
At first, the raised field project was ignored by the local and state government. National and international government programs, in addition to non-government organizations (which are thriving in Peru and Bolivia) involved in rural development were still very involved in implementing ideas promoted by the Green Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s. The idea was to promote the agricultural production at the level of the agricultural cooperative. Low interest loans, mechanized farming equipment, irrigation pumps, chemical fertilizers, and insecticides were made available to farmers to produce cash crops for national and international markets. Most of these "Green Revolution" projects introduced to highland Andean farmers were complete failures. My friends Ignacio Garaycochea and Juan Palao refer to the remains of twisted windmills, cracked cement irrigation canals, and rusted out tractors littering the rural countryside as "the archaeology of development." Many of the international projects claimed they were promoting "appropriate technology" (such as pumps, small tractors, tree farming, genetically improved seed, etc.). The technology may have been appropriate for some areas of the developing world, but it didn’t fit the environmental, historical, social, political and economic situation of farming communities in highland Peru and Bolivia.
