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Collation, Correlation, and Causation in the Prehistory of Coastal Peru
5.3. The Ascope Canal in the Chicama Valley is reputed to have been built by the Chimu
(ca. AD 1100–1450), though irrigation systems are notoriously difficult to date.
Photo by Jeffrey Quilter.
The advantages of mobility and flexibility in the face of changing circumstances
that existed in Peru and everywhere else during early prehistory also
had negative aspects. One price of irrigation agriculture was a reduction in
the number of buffering mechanisms that could overcome short-term shortages
and other recurring negative events that could not be solved by moving
to a different place or exploiting a different resource. Through time, the challenges
of the “known unknowns” of preparing for the next famine were met
by narrowing the range of subsistence strategies to grains and other foods that
could be stored for relatively long terms and by building infrastructure—irrigation
canals (figure 5.3) and storage facilities—that would both maximize the
amount of resources (“quantity is its own kind of quality”) and provide buffering
systems, through storage, to get through the bad times.
Once Peruvian coastal economies became dependent on irrigation agriculture
as the primary means of subsistence, issues of resilience, vulnerability,
and hazards arose similar to those of the Hohokam, as discussed by Margaret
Nelson and her colleagues in this volume. A future comparison of the two
situations might be enlightening, especially because while many of the advantages
and disadvantages of irrigation agriculture were similar in both societies,
there was also a fundamental difference. In the case of coastal Peru, the huge
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