One River Project
The One River project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Don Alberto Benavides for a period of five years, and now in its first year of investigation, seeks to track the flux in rich cultural florescence and collapse through time along a single river 鈥� the R铆o Ica 鈥� from its headwaters in the southern Andes to its mouth on a desert coast.听 The Andean region is one of humanity鈥檚 rare hearths of agriculture and 鈥榩ristine鈥� civilisation. Its Pacific coast is one of the world鈥檚 driest deserts, whose only sources of water are rivers arising in its rain-fed highland hinterlands. Second only to the Himalayas, the Andes encompass tremendous variations in human ecology (Shimada 1985), and, at these tropical latitudes, support cultivation even to extreme altitudes.听 Yet, despite the obvious interdependency between the hydrology and economy of coast and sierra, no investigation has yet taken the entire course of a single watershed as the appropriate unit of study within which to model changes in settlement, land use, water management and culture.听 We propose to do so for the R铆o Ica over the deep-time perspective of archaeology, from the Early Horizon (c. 750 bc) through to the end of the Inca Empire (ad 1532), by combining archaeological survey and excavation with the latest GIS, geomorphological and archaeobotanical methodologies.
听 听 Changes in Ancient Land and Water Use Along The R铆o Ica, Peru
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The Ica Valley is the perfect theatre within which to carry out such an investigation. Its ceramic sequence underlies Rowe鈥檚 (1967) widely used chronology for all Andean prehistory. The R铆o Ica links the highlands of Ayacucho with the south coast 鈥� two regions with long and rich cultural trajectories, not least those of the Wari Middle Horizon and Nasca, respectively. Here, the interactions between highlands and coast that characterise all Andean history, were 鈥� indeed still are 鈥� particularly intense. Today, significant stretches of the R铆o Ica on the coast and in the highlands are depopulated and bereft of cultivation. Yet their extensive archaeological remains attest to substantial ancient populations and thereby present a prima facie case for changing ecological and landscape conditions.
The climate along the R铆o Ica watershed varies from semi-arid (250.3 mm per year at Tambo, 3,250 m asl) to hyperarid (0.3 mm at Ocucaje, 320 m asl). The river鈥檚 flow is extremely seasonal and erratic, dropping through steep gradients in the sierra and then depositing rich alluvium in a series of wide basins on the coast.听 In such dry lands, ecological thresholds are sharply defined. The division and management of water and land resources have therefore always been critical in moulding the social fabric of this region and have in turn been shaped by the fluctuating fortunes of politics and resource availability (Mayer 2002).
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For our purposes we divide the R铆o Ica watershed into three sectors: the upper, middle and lower valleys.听Work in all three sectors has been apportioned according to respective specialities.听
Dr Kevin Lane has focussed on the upper valley segment together with a Peruvian co-颅director, Oliver听Huam谩n.听Dr David Beresford-颅Jones, Dr Sandy Pullen and Susana Arce, Director of the Museo Regional de听Ica have carried out investigations in the lower valley. Oliver Huam谩n and George Chauca have undertaken听additional surveys and studies of the middle valley. All the project teams work under the direction听of听Professor Charles French, who has direct input particularly into its geoarchaeological components.听
Other project participants include听Dr Lauren Cadwallader听(isotopes, 91探花视频), Dr Rob Scaife听(pollen, Southampton University), Dr Fraser Sturt (GIS, Southampton University) and Dr Jonas Berking听(hydrological modelling, FU Berlin). Leanne Zeki and Maria Ang茅lica Garcia are working on MPhil's using听GIS and archaeobotanical data, respectively, from the project. Meanwhile, undergraduates from the听91探花视频, the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima and the Universidad Nacional听San Luis Gonzaga de Ica have made important contributions to the project's fieldwork.
