Soils, Climate and Society: Archaeological Investigations in Ancient America

7: An EPIC Challenge: Estimating Site Population in South Coastal Peru

157 7 An EPIC Challenge Estimating Site Population in South Coastal Peru Sue Eileen Hayes The Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) agricultural simulation program was extensively discussed in chapter 5, which described testing its use in population estimation at Baking Pot, Belize. Wingard’s very different application of EPIC to study potential population arcs at Copán, Honduras (this volume), and its supplemental use to estimate maize production at Cerén, El Salvador (Dixon, this volume), demonstrate some of its other uses in archaeology. At all three of these sites, local data are reasonably available, and results are supported by additional information from mapping and excavation. This is not the case in south coastal Peru, where historical information about sites and their inhabitants is scarce and material from the initial, limited excavations is still being analyzed. The ancient cultural record has been selectively eradicated by looters. The agricultural landscape has been transformed by modern agriculture and construction ; the original land use can be generally reconstructed but never precisely known. Therefore, using information obtained from simulating the likely agriculture may be the only way to reconstruct an ancient population. CAMANÁ The Majes (Camaná) River is the longest river on the Peruvian coast and has the highest volume of flow of the southern coastal rivers. It drains an area of 10,237 square kilometers and, even with substantial diversions from the Rio Colca—a tributary—to the Majes Project, a large irrigation project on the coastal plain, has an average annual discharge of over 2 million cubic meters (Robinson 1964). While most of the lower Majes River flows through a narrow valley between coastal plains 300 meters or more above it, the delta at the mouth has over 6,700 hectares of irrigable land. The delta and adjacent coastal areas appear to have been inhabited well before the Spanish established a short-lived settlement, La Villa Hermosa de Camaná, in November 1539—possibly at the site of Huacapuy, an area sue eileen hayes 158 surrounded by looted cemeteries. The valley was known to the Inka; Pedro de Cieza de Leon and his coauthors describe the Inka coastal road running through “Ocona and Camaná and Quilca, where there are large rivers” (1959, 349). Insummer2006threesites—Pampatá,Pillistay,andSoto—alllocatedinthelower reaches of the Majes River Valley in south coastal Peru, were investigated, including mapping and selective excavation (Tantaleán and Owen 2007). They are among many small sites that line both sides of the river valley. All sites in the valley were buried by the eruption of Huaynaputina Volcano in February AD 1600. Professional looters, huaqueros, had been active in the valley about a decade earlier—digging into suspected burials on the sites and in cemeteries looking for feathered capes, which were rumored to have been found in the valley, and strewing human remains and unmarketable artifacts among the pits. In some cases burial areas could not be clearly associated with a known site. One question raised during this project was potential site population. All three sites, which likely date from AD 1300–1400, in the Late Intermediate period (Owen, personal communication 2009), had courtyard complexes that could be mapped using the outlines created by river stone and mud walls or foundations. Additional areas had no visible remains of construction; however, they demonstrated a regularity of slope and dimensions similar to the mapped complexes (figure 7.1). Mapped Figure 7.1. Center of Pampatá, view across valley an epic challenge 159 Figure 7.2. Site map of Pampatá, Peru courtyards included remains of storage rooms and bins, platforms that might have been roofed porches, locations with household and livestock waste products, and other areas for which no evidence of possible uses remained. Courtyard areas varied in size; those at Pampatá, for example, ranged from 250 square meters to over 800 square meters (figure 7.2). Looters had destroyed roofs and dismantled parts of structures. Therefore, not only is there no sure way to determine the area occupied by inhabitants of a site, but there was little evidence of the ways much of the space had been used. Even had it been possible to calculate the area of occupation at each site, the problem of the use of that space remained. In the Camaná Valley, observation of current household composition and use patterns may not be reliable for recreating earlier patterns of use, although there is some similarity between elements of the sites and...