This is a well-proportioned and elegant book that covers a wide range—over 13 000 years of archaeology, history and ethnohistory—and diverse series of articles analysing the development of life and civilisation along the west-central seaboard of South America. As Victor Thompson's foreword succinctly points out, Michael Moseley's (Reference Moseley1975) The Maritime foundations of Andean civilization (MFAC) hypothesis permeates every article and aspect of this book, and coming 45 years after that was first published, this volume is a very timely and welcome addition to this abiding theme.
Standing on the shoulders of earlier giants such as Junius Bird, Frederic Engel, Edward Lanning and Thomas Patterson, Moseley posited that the real foundations of coastal Andean civilisation were the rich fishing grounds off the Pacific Coast. By homing in on MFAC hypothesis, indeed developing it much further than its Preceramic Period (13 000–3800 BP) roots, this book delves deep into what marine resources truly represented for these coastal populations through subsequent periods all the way to the Spanish colonial era.
The volume benefits greatly from the insights provided by known stalwarts in the field, including Tom Dillehay, Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, Winifred Creamer and Jonathan Haas, and more recent professionals, such as Nicolas Goepfert, David Chicoine and Parker VanValkenburgh. Aside from a select number of important outliers on northern Chile and Ecuador, most of the articles deal with developments on the central and northern coasts of Peru, for which Moseley originally proposed MFAC. It is for this key area that Creamer and Haas (Chapter 5) make the interesting observation that, in light of MFAC's pliability and applicability to the Preceramic and Initial Period (3800–2900 BP), we should seriously entertain the possibility of a Preceramic Horizon based on political, ideological and economic expansion across this crucial region of the central and northern Peruvian coasts.
This is a book with its heart and mind fixed firmly on the sea, and as such analogous to that, albeit more historically oriented, approach taken by David Abulafia (Reference Abulafia2011) in his volume on the Mediterranean and the communities that lived and live off that sea. As Helmer (Chapter 6, p. 165) states, MFAC challenged, and this book continues to challenge, the agriculture-centric perspectives of human societal development that so permeate our discipline. By focusing on fishers—an underrepresented and oft-marginalised group within Andean archaeology—in all their guises, the articles here examine how the sea shaped coastal identities both spatially and diachronically; and while climate is never far away from these diverse articles, the underlying theme is one of deep resilience to environmental changes by the populations described herein.
A major common thread throughout many of the articles is the enduring nature of marine exploitation through time, even in the face of emergent complexity (Calogero et al., Chapter 2), limited resources (Salazar et al., Chapter 3; Geopfert et al., Chapter 11), or the increasing importance of land-based assets (Creamer and Haas, Chapter 5; Chicoine et al., Chapter 7). Indeed, this reliance on marine resources was not the precursor to complexity only during the Preceramic or Initial Period (Dillehay, Chapter 4; Haas and Creamer, Chapter 5), but is seen here as the cornerstone, together with maize cultivation, towards greater socio-political complexity in late period (AD 700–1500) Ecuador (Stothert et al., Chapter 12).
In emphasising marine exploitation, the articles in this volume see the role of the household or community as paramount. In so doing, these authors favour a bottom-up approach to political economy and social construction in which the state takes a subsidiary position. Thus, Billman (Chapter 10) reinterprets the site of Cerro La Virgen (AD 1000–1532) not so much as a Chimú or Inca satellite, but rather as a self-sufficient household-/community-based system of mostly marine resource consumption, a pattern echoed by Prieto (Chapter 8) at Pampa Gramalote during the Initial Period through to the Early Intermediate Period (3450–1350 BP) in the Moche Valley, and by Stothert et al. (Chapter 12) for Ecuador. Likewise, VanValkenburgh (Chapter 14) studies fishing communities, or parcialidades, in the Zaña Valley, emphasising the fact that, contrary to prejudiced expectation, fishing communities did not necessarily occupy the lowest rung of Prehispanic or early colonial society. Similarly, Marcus et al. (Chapter 13) concentrate on artisanal fishers in the recent past (1980s) and the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1400), attempting to glean data on El Niño-Southern Oscillation weather patterns from middens. Although they are ultimately unsuccessful in this endeavour, they do posit interesting differences between elite and commoner consumption of marine resources.
Yet perhaps the most important take-home message of this book is the fluidity with which economic patterns could shift while fisher identity remained intact. In this sense, numerous articles in the book (mainly but not exclusively: Helmer, Chapter 6; Chicoine et al., Chapter 7; Prieto, Chapter 8; Ramírez, Chapter 15) attest to a growing influence of land-based products in these economies while the communities retained a close identity and social contract with the sea. This theme is developed further by Sutter and Prieto (Chapter 9) who analyse the genetic biodistance spatially and temporally between northern coast populations and others along the Pacific littoral. This leads them to enounce that identity is not a genetic marker, rather it is a cultural and social construct that can vary throughout time, or even within a single generation.
In essence, you are much more what you say you are, and not necessarily what you are seen to be doing. In the compressed ecozones of the Andes where the distances between the coast and jungle are short and straddle a number of vertiginous cordilleras, this ability to shift between occupations would have lent resilience and adaptability to South American communities in the face of climate change and environmental uncertainty. This is why Andean scholarship is replete with economic descriptors that attest to the mutability of economic lifeways. Terms such as agro-pastoralists, mixed-farmers and their iterations abound; and after this volume, to these we can safely add fisher-gatherers, fisher-farmers and why not fisher-herders.
