free download - University Press of Colorado

Five
Collation, Correlation, and Causation in
the Prehistory of Coastal Peru
Daniel H. Sandweiss and Jeffrey Quilter
To the casual visitor and even many archaeologists, the mountains and deserts
of Peru (figure 5.1) appear timeless and unchanging. Indeed, mountains
are frequently metaphors for long-term stability and slow change: “how many
years can a mountain exist, before it is washed to the sea” asked Bob Dylan.
So, too, the coastal strip shared by much of Chile and Peru hosts one of the
driest deserts in the world (figure 5.2), which imbues the visitor with a sense of
constancy. Regional archaeology features a great variety of unearthed artifacts
made of perishable materials—wood, bone, shell, cloth—that would have disintegrated
long ago in other environments. Subspecialties in scholarship have
developed from the products of the dry, coastal environment: textile experts
who study brightly colored, intricately woven textiles of coastal Peru, and biological
anthropologists who can investigate ancient diseases and pathologies
thanks to well-preserved human remains. But the apparent stability of the
landscape of western South America belies a highly dynamic geological and
biophysical terrain.
To address issues of prehistoric human ecodynamics in this extraordinary
place, we begin by describing the region. We then consider in general terms
the methodological and epistemological challenges to understanding collation,
correlation, and causation in the archaeological record, with particular
reference to human-environment interaction. We conclude with a detailed case
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