Identification of archaeological macrobotanical geophytes from the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia: studying the early long-lived focus on tubers in early Andean agriculture

Abstract The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture initiated fundamental changes in the way people interacted with plant communities both in the loci of domestication and beyond. The South American Andes is one domestication center that provided some of the world’s most important foods. The domestication processes of underground storage organs (USOs) such as Solanum, Oxalis, Ullucus, Tropaeolum and Lepidium began across the high plains of the Andes, yet our knowledge of the timing of domestication and the commitment to agriculture lags compared to other regions. Decades of research on the Taraco Peninsula in the southern Lake Titicaca basin have amassed a systematic set of archaeological information that pertains to the periods that saw climatic change during the shift to more sedentary, agricultural lifeways. While we have known that this is a locus of tuber domestication through ethnographic, microbotanical and genetic data, scholars and archaeologists have been unable to identify and differentiate the many species that were domesticated through macrobotanical remains. Recently, we have been focusing on this tuber identification using the macrobotanical remains of these delicate foods, and their early evidence in the archaeological record, to gain a better sense of the timing of these plants that were domesticated as the climate became particularly amenable to agriculture, around 3000 bce . Through taphonomic analysis, we are tracking how the early settlers of the basin engaged with these future staples and how these actions interweave with the Andean ontology of landscape engagement.