We can consider chicha production as an example of the difficulty of distinguishing between the production of feasts and daily meals: the steps of chicha production have been documented ethnographically and through experimental archaeology in the Andes , including on the north coast of Peru . These studies point to three broad contexts of production: large-scale chicha production within permanent facilities; small-scale household production; and production for feasts by attached households. Although state-sponsored chicha breweries have been documented at several Prehispanic sites, Hayashida points out that household production is difficult to identify in the archaeological record, because chicha is usually made in kitchens where food is also prepared, and these foods also comprise the same ingredients used in chicha . Within Andean households, daily plant food processing may have been conducted for a variety of purposes: to prepare for community events such as feasts or work parties; to meet tribute demands; and to prepare and store foods to meet daily household needs. If we consider the distribution of labor associated with household and supra household tasks related to food and farming, Andean ethnographies and ethnohistories overwhelmingly indicate that labor is highly gendered . Guaman Poma de Ayala describes how each age/gender were assigned a specific role amongst the Inka and were required to participate in the maintenance of the household. Men engaged in seasonal agriculture, as well as lithic production and some herding; women also played a role in seasonal agricultural work , as well as spinning, weaving, and herding; children were responsible for many small tasks, such as gathering fuel wood, plants for dyes, or herbs, as well as herding . Guaman Poma de Ayala further described aqllakuna, a group of select women from regions conquered by the Inka who were sequestered at state facilities known as aqllawasis . Referred to as monjas , these women “made textiles, chicha, and food and did not sin” . Separating the aqllakuna from their own kin , the Inka created fictive kinship networks and heralded these women as virgins of the sun ,stacking pots whose primary purpose was to serve the state, including as food producers. On a broader scale, the typical view in the Andes is a gender-divided dynamic of men working in fields and women processing harvests, linked to the basic economic unit of the household.

These cultural ideals are likely flexible , as the realities of work on a day-to-day or seasonal basis are/were negotiated. Indeed, women in Andean societies often are responsible for storing seed and planting, whereas men plow, harvest, load pack animals, and organize transport of crops to the house . Overall, however, women primarily are considered responsible for the preparation of daily meals in traditional Andean households , and they manage food preparation and serving for supra-household events including feasts. Rather than seeing household labor related to food and farming as drudgery, scholars including Skar , Krögel , and Zimmerer examine the powers women exercise as purveyors of culinary and agricultural knowledge. According to Skar , Andean women are widely reported to exert exclusive control over storage and distribution of agricultural products. As the movement of agricultural products shifts outside of the household to larger community events or to meet tribute demands, however, this exclusive control of agricultural products may change. Kelly and Heidke summarize a range of anthropological and economic scholarship that suggests a correlation between increasing rigidity between gendered tasks and increasing dependence on agriculture . Ethnographic data suggest that women’s participation in intensive agriculture decreases relative to men’s participation as women increase tasks related to food processing and domestic production . The process of agricultural intensification in the Andes, whether through canal irrigation or agricultural terracing , or through shortening fallow sytems more generally, likely impacted the spatial distribution of domestic labor. When interpreting gender relations through the lens of archaeological data, scholars run the risk of uncritically relying on ethnographic analogy to project gender ideologies and practices onto the past. This research tradition is problematic in the Andes, where pan-Andean concepts of “lo andino” prevail, positing that Andean traditions and cultural identities experience continuity across time and space . Scholars also disproportionately rely on models derived from knowledge of the Inka, in the absence of an ethnohistoric record for more ancient polities.Drawingon Goody and Mayer , Murra suggests that during this era, the basic tax unit was the “traditional household,” a married couple and their children, who worked together as a unit to provide tribute, with laborers tilling state fields and women processing agricultural produce . On the Peruvian north coast, ethnohistoric documents provide excellent sources for understanding Chimu communities in addition to Inka life ways.

Many of these sources indicate that a network of patron-client relationships existed between leaders and commoners during the reign of the Chimu Empire . Known as señores, curacas, caciques, or principales in ethnohistoric documents, these leaders were arrayed in a political hierarchy ranging from local lords to the king of the Chimu Empire and his kin. Each curaca controlled groups of families, known as parcialidades, as well as specific resources . In exchange for protection and access to those resources, each parcialidad of farmers, fishermen, or crafting households provided annual tribute payments in the form of goods and labor to the local lord. Thus, occupational specialization largely dictated the gendered division of labor witnessed in north coast households, as each parcialidad focused on a particular productive activity, such as farming, fishing, or crafting. As a result, we must carefully interrogate the limits of our data when reimagining ancient labor relations and gender dynamics tied to food ways in the more distant past. In her study of Wari households in southern Peru, Nash suggests that independent domestic units were not necessarily economically independent, and that labor associated with food ways tacks back and forth between the household and larger community events. In this dissertation, I attempt to redefine ideas about the complexity of the Moche and food production that have long been grounded in proxy features such as irrigation canals, or on more general aspects of production. I draw on ethnographic and ethnohistoric models to conceptualize ancient gender and labor relations during the EIP, and posit that men, women, and children likely participated in various tasks on an everyday basis to provide the basic economic requirements that sustained a household, as well as to meet the requirements for supra-household events and tribute demands. It is likely that individuals from multiple houses pooled labor on a daily basis to meet those requirements; thus, my consideration of ancient labor and gender relations is inherently collaborative. Theorizing food ways and labor, including through the lens of paleoethnobotany, represents a relatively new endeavor, particularly in the Moche Valley but also in the Andes more broadly. I now turn to a review of recent literature that attempts to push plant data into the realm of social archaeology and that serves as a framework for this study. How have Andean scholars addressed issues related to the theoretical frameworks of food ways, labor, and gender outlined above? A host of issues, from agricultural intensification to feasting, have been discussed in the Andes largely in the absence of systematically collected paleoethnobotanical data; rather, these discussions revolve around proxy measures such as irrigation canals, terraces, lithic tools for agricultural intensification, ceramic vessels and other serving implements, and the analysis of functional spaces for feasting.

In recent decades, however, the Andean region has witnessed a growth in the number of practicing paleoethnobotanists, with pioneering groundwork laid by scholars such as Christine Hastorf , Deborah Pearsall , and Shelia Pozorski among others. Paleoethnobotany has been somewhat limited on the Peruvian north coast, with the exception of important works by Shelia Pozorski and George Gumerman , discussed below. In a region where academic and popular imaginations have historically been focused on monumental architecture, large mortuary contexts, and power-wielding elites, paleoethnobotany’s contribution to reconstructing the Andean past is not particularly well known. The fact that both professional discourse and popular imaginations of the ancient Moche overwhelmingly have centered on the more romantic and macro-scale aspects of past societies makes the pursuit of more micro-scale research significant. As discussed above, a major shift that we have witnessed in the past few decades is a movement away from pure subsistence reconstruction towards examinations of food ways. A consideration of food ways is not just a concern with what foods people eat—that is,grow lights not just lists of foodstuffs or caloric intakes—but how people procure, prepare, and serve different combinations of foods, and what meanings meals might have in varied contexts. Are the plants we recover in archaeological assemblages representative of every day foods, and/or did they serve medicinal or technological purposes? Could the plants represent special purpose ritual foods , or luxury foods that are difficult to procure or restricted to certain contexts ? Are they partitioned in various communities along class, status, gendered, or ethnic lines? Are the uses of certain plant foods structured by power and inequality? Several recent case studies in the Andes use paleoethnobotanical data to evaluate these issues. In my review of these cases below, I highlight several key themes, including ritual, hierarchy, political economy, and daily practice —it is within these theoretical areas that paleoethnobotany in the Andes has meshed most with social archaeology2 . A number of recent paleoethnobotanical investigations have focused on ritual, in that scholars have examined plant remains to identify, characterize, and understand past ritual practices. A focus on ritual diverges from earlier utilitarian emphases in paleoethnobotany that viewed plant remains solely as indicators of ecological settings, subsistence patterns, or utilitarian resources .

Plants can serve as artifacts of ritual experience and are often key components in the physical materialization of religious beliefs. Researchers focusing on ritual in the Andes tend to identify plants in the archaeological record that have recorded ritual uses in ethnographic records, or they tend to examine ritual contexts where plants were used, such as funerary contexts or feasts. Often in the latter cases, spatial contexts are identified prior to conducting analysis of plant data . Attempts to identify ritual plants in Andean contexts include Belmonte and colleagues’ examination of coca leaves recovered from offering bags in funerary contexts from three Tiwanaku period cemeteries in Northern Chile. Their analysis of coca varieties indicates that it was locally grown in the Arica/Bolivia area, and they infer that the individuals interred with the coca offering bags were likely in positions of power/higher status, due to the ritual/ceremonial importance of coca that has long been recognized in Andean communities from prehispanic to modern times . Muñoz Ovalle provides new archaeobotanical evidence of early interment of people with coca in the Formative Period in Arica, Chile; he also describes the importance of vegetable fibers in burials, identifying local water plants and reeds that would have been used to make mats for the interred. Morcote-Riós discusses plant remains from funerary contexts in Southwestern Columbia spanning 650 to 1250 A.D. He identified a range of fruits and seeds associated with burial contexts, including varieties of cotton , mosses, bamboos or reeds, and achiote , the oils of which may have been used to anoint the heads of deceased interred in tree trunk sarcophagi. In addition to inventorying the types of plants used by ancient Andean peoples to inter their dead, it is important to understand how this inventory differs from plants that people ate or used in their daily lives. Cutright analyzed plant remains from Lambayeque period burials at the site of Farfán in the Jequetepeque Valley of northern Peru, comparing her data to the Moche mortuary offerings at Pacatnamu analyzed by George Gumerman . She contrasts food remains recovered in mortuary contexts with domestic contexts at Farfán, arguing that food used in ritual contexts, including funerary food offerings, was used in domestic culinary traditions as well as in ceremonial practices. Interestingly, the high amounts of maize recovered in mortuary contexts do not appear to reflect quotidian diet, as domestic contexts included a wider variety of resources, including fruits. A ritual/quotidian distinction was also noted by Capparelli et al. at the site of El Shincal, a colonial-Inka administrative center in Northwest Argentina.