Under the direction of Professor Robert Drennan, Mr. Dale Quattrin will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct excavations at 4 to 5 sites situated at different altitude levels in the Valley de la Plata, which is located at the headwaters of the Rio Magdalene in southwestern Colombia. While the Andean region provides the best known examples of prehispanic civilizations in South America, within the Rio Magdalene region a wide scale, complex prehistoric culture developed which was marked by a complex funeral cult and by monumental architecture. Dr. Drennan has worked for many years to document this phenomenon. The Magdalene area covers a wide range of altitudes and at the present time different crops are grown at different heights. Mr. Quattrin wants to determine how ancient this pattern is and the role that possible exchange may have played in the development of the Magdalene culture. To accomplish this he will locate sites which are spread vertically across the zone and excavate them. He will then analyze both pollen samples, which show what plants were grown at each altitude, as well as macrobotanical and phytolith remains which indicate what was consumed. By this means it will be possible to reconstruct both production and consumption patterns and infer whether or not and food moved over space, and if so what foods were involved. Archaeologists have used ethnohistoric and ethnographic data from the Andes to describe a number of exchange models. It is clear that in areas such as Peru where resources varied by attitudinal zone, complex strategies were devised to minimize risk by moving different crops across zones. However it is neither known how far back this practice extends in time nor the role it may have played in the development of complex Andean societies. Given the excellent data base collected by Dr. Drennan, it will be possible for Mr. Quattrin to examine this question in Colombia. This research is important for several reasons. It will both address a significant theoretical issue and provide data of interest to a large number of archaeologists. It will also assist in the training of an extremely promising scientist.
