By not solely relying on typological distinctions witnessed in the present, largely an effect of colonial efforts conducted over the last 500 years , we can more fruitfully reimagine ancient culture contact scenarios, which often involved the exchange of foodstuffs, as well as the technologies needed to process and serve them. A final goal of this project is to understand the staging of food ways during the transition to intensive agricultural production in the Gallinazo/Early Moche phases. Detailed architectural analyses from MV-225, an EIP highland colony site afford the opportunity to examine where certain plant foods were processed and prepared , and permit me to make inferences out possible genderand status-based segregation at the site. In addition to the types and amounts of foods consumed, socially-constructed cuisine preferences can be archaeologically evident from distribution patterns across space. As Hastorf highlights, ethnographic studies have shown that we can see differential spatial patterning of artifacts in storage contexts, food preparation loci, refuse disposal areas, and in or near domestic structures; such patterns are the result of habitual domestic practices. I compare the distribution of plant food remains from specific functional spaces at MV-225, as well as their distribution in higher and lower status compounds, drawing primarily on Ringberg’s functional classifications but also independently testing her classifications with a Principal Component Analysis. I draw on a range of ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and ethnoarchaeological accounts, from studies of rural farmers in the town of Moche in the 1920s to present day smallholders in the Ecuadorian and Bolivian Andes, to contextualize my interpretations about gender, space, and the organization of food ways . My intrasite spatial analysis reveals that a significant amount of food processing, including of maize,nft growing system occurred in enclosed kitchen spaces.

Women likely were responsible for this food processing, for daily meals as well as for supra household events on terraces and patios in which they may not have participated in the consumption of foodstuffs prepared. While data are needed from other sites to make diachronic comparisons about the spatial organization of food ways in the Moche Valley, the spatial data from MV-225 offer an intriguing glimpse into life ways and labor at a highland colony during the EIP. Three final points emerge from this study. First, the diachronic comparison of the five Moche Valley datasets highlights the importance of evaluating both change and continuity in food ways in light of the existing social, political, economic, and ideological systems in which they played a variety of important roles. The consideration of contexts both pre- and post-political consolidation is crucial for understanding changes in agricultural strategies, along with associated changes in domestic labor, gender relations, and social status. In this study, I consider long-term change by tracing shifts in plant cultivation and collection, agricultural intensification, and gender and status relations as tied to labor at the household level over five cultural horizons during the EIP . A second point to consider is that the ways in which food was used was highly dependent on the political dimensions of the Moche Valley at the time these sites were occupied.The food practices discussed here were embedded within increasingly socially hierarchical and economically stratified societies, and thus are inextricably tied to notions of status, including status defined along gendered lines. Reconstructing the routine intimacies of household contexts can be a productive means of investigating subject formation and the inscription and contestation of power through daily social practices, in addition to larger social and political events. Finally, it is important to note that my discussion of Moche Valley food ways, while considered through the lens of archaeological data, has been shaped by and has implications for people in the political present.

As discussed above, our understandings of highland/coastal interaction in the past have largely been shaped by modern notions of difference. Indigenous food choice today echoes the political and ideological impacts of colonialism and continues to play an active role in how people respond, react to, and situate themselves within changing power structures. The interplay of food, politics, and identity underscores the idea that colonialism is an ongoing project, and that the negotiation of food ways must be regarded as an active and agentive process rather than a foregone event . Throughout the course of conducting research for this dissertation from 2010-2015, I walked through fields tended by smallholding farmers, chatted with women tending plants in house gardens, and shared meals with rural families in their homes, sitting on packed earthen floors, consuming soups and stews cooked over open hearths . I do not suggest that traditions of food preparation and serving in Moche Valley households have remained static for millennia, but these instances remind us of the deep antiquity of traditional Andean cuisine and the ties of contemporary residents to their prehispanic past. Indeed, it is archaeology’s perspective on the longue durée that can grant primacy to Indigenous agency and traditions that pre-date European colonialism . Emphasizing the many stages of decision-making in food use, I incorporate variousbodies of theory, including ecological and practice-oriented perspectives, to discuss shifts in agricultural production, gender dynamics, labor relations, and migrations during this complementary and coterminous period of complex polity formation and diaspora. Ultimately, the case study of this dissertation speaks to the power of plant data for evaluating a key political dynamic that has previously remained untested. By not solely relying on indirect proxies for food production and instead examining direct subsistence evidence, we can more fruitfully reimagine ancient economies and the resulting implications for understanding complex sociopolitical dynamics in the more recent and distant past. In the chapters to follow, I expand upon the themes and questions that I have raised above. Chapter 2 situates my theoretical perspective on gender, foodways, and labor, in the Andes and more broadly. I discuss anthropological approaches to the study of food ways and labor that use data from the archaeological record, and then I provide a review of recent literature that pushes paleoethnobotany into the realm of social archaeology in the Andes. Chapter 3 provides background information on the ecology and geography of the Moche Valley, along with an overview of current research on cultural developments in the EIP.

I conclude this chapter with a specific discussion of what is known about Moche food ways to date, based on data from limited earlier studies. This chapter sets the stage , for the diachronic comparison of Moche Valley subsistence that follows. Chapter 4 discusses the plant remains recovered from the five EIP Moche Valley sites in detail. In this chapter, I summarize sampling strategies, methods, preservation issues, and other factors that impacted the ways in which I collected and analyzed thepaleoethnobotanical data, and I employ quantitative analysis to explore changes in patterns of plant food use through time. Chapter 5 zooms in on one of the study sites, MV-225, a highland colony occupied during the Gallinazo/Early Moche phases and presents an intrasite spatial analysis. My goal in this chapter is to explore the staging of food ways, in order to evaluate how migrant subsistence practices were organized with respect to gender and status groups in the context of intensive agricultural production. Chapter 6 summarizes the results of my case study and attempts to retie the threads of Moche Valley EIP food history back to the theoretical issues and questions raised in this introductory chapter. I conclude with directions for future research. The goal of this chapter is to provide a theoretical framework for understanding food ways and labor through the lens of paleoethnobotanical data, in the Early Intermediate Period, or EIP Moche Valley specifically and in the ancient Andes more broadly. I discuss anthropological approaches to the study of food ways and labor that use data from the archaeological record, and then I provide a review of recent literature that pushes paleoethnobotany into the realm of social archaeology in the Andes. A focus on food ways and labor departs from traditional top-down approaches of how elites manifested and wielded political, economic, and ideological power in the Moche Valley. If we accept the idea that foods are “good to think” as well as “good to eat” , then the social relations of food and eating should be considered a productive realm for investigating themes such as identity, tradition, gender, labor, and power, in the EIP Moche Valley and beyond. In the Andes today, comuneros , a peasant class,nft hydroponic system make up 95 percent or more of the population in rural towns. Their lives are oriented around agrarian pursuits, with a sense of spiritual community engendered by cooperative work in fields . During my six summer seasons of research in the Moche Valley for this dissertation, I chatted with local farmers in their fields, and often was invited into homes to share meals cooked in ceramic pots over wood hearths, with food debris swept into corners of packed earthen floors. Though not static, these traditions related to foodways can be witnessed in an archaeological record that spans over two millennia. The tasks related to planting, tending, and harvesting, along with processing, cooking, serving, and sharing, condition the rhythms of every day life on the north coast, in the Andes, and beyond, and also have consequences for gender stratification and social inequality. These themes guide my analysis detailed in the chapters that follow. In everyday household and community life, food ways are highly visible and pervasive reminders of individual and collective identity, ideology, and social status. Foodways, a term that refers to a broad range of practices associated with food, may be conceptualized in terms of diet as well as cuisine .

Food is produced/procured, prepared, shared, and consumed multiple times a day, in public and private settings, amongst families and during larger community gatherings, and often is at the heart of social interaction and cultural expression. It is perhaps unsurprising that even in the midst of immense cultural change, including periods of intensive contact with outsiders, food practices are one of the most enduring aspects of traditional life ways among indigenous peoples . Such persistence is not only explained by environmental or ecological realities, but also by the symbolic importance of historically situated practices embodied in all facets of daily food production and consumption . The value of exploring past social and political change through the lens of food ways is apparent in a broad range of anthropological literature. It has become axiomatic within anthropology that social relationships are constructed through food-related practices and embodied in food . Within the past few decades, archaeologists have increasingly engaged in the study of past commensal relations through the material remains of food ways. Archaeological subsistence studies have moved far beyond dietary reconstructions to examine cooking and cuisine as related to political and ideological discourse , revealing that food ways can serve as strong markers of gender, ethnicity, status, and class, and often are deeply rooted in tradition. However, as Pollock notes, the recent focus in archaeology and related disciplines on feasting and other special commensal occasions should be balanced by attention to daily commensality, in which crucial elements of social reproduction take place. A primary focus on feasting diverts attention from the everyday negotiations of class, gender, status, and ethnicity that are implicated in everyday household tasks related to food . In many cultures, staple foods are “loaded with meanings of home, family, hospitality, nourishing, and sharing with the community” . The loci of food preparation, whether within households or in communal facilities, are places where children are enmeshed in group norms and ideologies . Indeed, in domestic household kitchens, food usually is prepared by unpaid family members , many of whom are often women. While labor related to food ways historically has been characterized as “women’s work” and often has been viewed as drudgery , possessing culinary or agricultural knowledge can also give women a good deal of power . Food and eating are central to conceptions of social relationships, power, status, reproduction, economy, ideology, and sex, all of which are fundamental to constructions of identity . As a result, choices of foods consumed, as well as organization of food production activities, often can be attributed to individual identity, group definition and solidarity, or hierarchical position . In this dissertation, I focus my discussion on plant food ways, and explore a range of field cultigens, tree crops, other fruits, and miscellaneous wild resources exploited by ancient residents of the Moche Valley of north coastal Peru.