Under the guidance of Drs. Steven Kuhn and Mark Aldenderfer, Randy Haas will analyze the formation histories of five previously recorded Late Archaic Period (7,000-5,000 B.P.) hunter-gatherer sites in the western Lake Titicaca Basin, Peru. The Basin's Late Archaic Period has received little attention even though the period marks the eve of an agricultural transition that led to the endogenous emergence of the Tiwanaku state around A.D. 300. Previous work suggests that nearly all of the hallmarks of social complexity - e.g., residential sedentism, food production, and craft specialization - are represented in the Late Archaic record. However, Haas' recent settlement pattern analyses have revealed a potential signature of social complexity: settlement-size hierarchy. Settlement-size hierarchy refers to a statistical pattern in site-size distribution that geographers, economists, and archaeologists have described as the rank-size rule, Zipf's law, or a power law. Differential erosion and burial do not appear to explain the observed site-size pattern, supporting a behavioral model instead. The archaeological observation in the Titicaca Late Archaic may represent a first for prehistoric hunter-gatherer settlement pattern analysis and raises the question of how it could emerge among mobile foragers. Several models of settlement and site-formation are considered, and test excavations at the largest Late Archaic Period sites in the Ilave sub-basin will generate chronometric and material data for testing model-driven hypotheses.
Understanding behaviors that drive emergent social complexity in human societies is of paramount importance to anthropological research. Archaeological observations provide a means for inferring the order in which key behaviors appeared in trajectories of increasing complexity. The Lake Titicaca Basin, one of few world regions to have witnessed archaic state formation, offers a critical case study. Archaeologists have shown that incipient sedentism, food-production, and pastoralism appeared ca. 5,500 B.P. in the Titicaca Basin Terminal Archaic Period. The first clear signs of craft specialization, social stratification, and monumental architecture appeared subsequently ca. 3,500 B.P. in the Formative Period. Previous settlement-pattern analyses have suggested that settlement-size hierarchies emerged in the Formative. However, because statistically indistinguishable site-size hierarchies appeared at least 2,000 years earlier in the Late Archaic Period, prior to any other dimension of social complexity, one could hypothesize that site-size scaling catalyzed incipient complexity in the Titicaca Basin rather than the other way around as current models suggest. The anthropological question that follows and drives the current research is, What forager behavior generated the archaeological site-size pattern? Stratigraphic, radiocarbon, feature, and lithic data from test excavations in the five largest Late Archaic Period sites in the Ilave region will be used to infer the degree to which these sites reflect comparatively long occupations, frequent re-occupations, and/or large-group occupation.
Excavations and laboratory activities will foster stronger international relations with Peruvians - Ayamara and non-indigenous, academic and non-academic. All new data will be curated and made available to qualified individuals by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture and The Digital Archaeological Record. Analytical results will be presented to Peruvian and U.S. communities in public talks, conference presentations, and peer-reviewed publications ranging from regional to theoretical in scope.
