Firman
Diego Salazar (autor de contenidos)
Frances Hayashida (autora de contenidos)
Marco de la participación
Resumen
The Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on earth. In this challenging environment, past and present inhabitants of the Atacama must establish an adequate and rational management of the resource most basic to life: water. During the Late Intermediate Period (ca. 950 ? 1400 AD) complex social systems developed in the area, with aggregated populations that depended on a mixed farming and pastoral economy. They established an adequate and rational management of water through the construction of complex irrigation systems and the careful management of soils and crops. Large-scale agriculture in the area served not only as the basis for biological reproduction but for the social reproduction of the community as well. Sometime during the first half of the 15th Century the Tawantinsuyu or Inka empire made its dominion over Atacama based on a territorial strategy which implied a highly controlled extraction model. The main attraction for the Inka of the Atacama was its mineral wealth, but Inka mining operations had to be provisioned with surplus food produced at agricultural locis. In this paper we discuss the evidence of preinka and Inka organization of agricultural production on the Loa River Basin, specifically as seen at the sites of Topaín and Panire. We aim to understand and explain the strategies developed by the local communities to manage water and agriculture under two distinct sociopolitical contexts, focusing on the social, technological, and political dimensions of production and its changes from a community specialization system o state control of production.