Abstract
‘Trees are good to think with’ writes David Goldstein (p. 6, citing Maurice Bloch), and indeed, there can be few finer archaeological expressions of such an idea than this inestimable book. It emerges from large-scale archaeological investigations, led by Izumi Shimada, of Sicán: a society (or societies) which flourished some 1000 years ago in Lambayeque, where a number of rivers draining the western slopes of the Andes make for one of the largest and most verdant valley systems on the otherwise arid north coast of Peru. The hallmark of Sicán was marvellous metalwork, particularly in gold, depicting an iconographic canon closely related to that of Moche, whom it succeeded on the Peruvian north coast.
At the book’s heart lies an archaeobotanical analysis of fuel at Middle Sicán metalworking and ceramic workshops. In doing so it performs the essential basic service of publishing identification criteria for archaeobotanical data in a region for which precious few studies exist. Yet it goes far beyond the usual checklists of identifications, which can then safely be consigned to the perpetual twilight of the archaeological monograph’s appendices. For Goldstein uses this archaeobotanical data of fuel – ‘the energetic basis of craft production’ (p. 1) – as the platform for a rich and subtle examination of Sicán labour organization and resource management.
The book starts with an articulate declaration of Goldstein’s ambitious research agenda. In short, this is twofold: to properly understand the region’s ecology, and so to carry out what he calls a ‘paleoethnobotanical’ interpretation of the archaeological record. The idea that humans were key parts of the ancient ecosystems that they inhabited might seem almost indubitable. Yet remarkably, just as Goldstein points out (pp. 4–5, 92–93), it is a perspective that is, for the most part, still either ignored or patronized in archaeology, not least in the Andean region: one of the world’s few hearths of agriculture and ‘pristine’ civilization. This chapter amounts to a passionate, and yet entirely reasoned, cri de coeur for the importance of archaeobotany to archaeological interpretation.
Chapter 2 then paints a picture of the region’s dry forest ecology: not a pale background wash over which some overwrought social theory may then be pasted, but rather a meticulous rendering based upon personal observation, wide reading and considerable intimacy with local informants. Indeed, this latter quality also informs Chapter 3, which presents the archaeological record of Middle Sicán workshops in the context of still extant practices of charcoal and ceramic manufacture in the area. The excellent detail of both these chapters is then brought together and used to examine various strands of archaeological theory, especially those that have been evoked for the Andean Region, in Chapter 4, to offer what the author terms a ‘cultural-environmental framework for interpreting charcoal’. As a fellow Andeanist and archaeobotanist, I found this one of the book’s highlights – an erudite statement of how various theoretical models fare when applied to the particular ecological and ethnobotanical setting of Lambayeque during the Sicán period.
Chapters 5, 6 and 7 present the methods, and archaeobotanical evidence derived thereby, in Goldstein’s investigations at the Middle Sicán workshop sites of Huaca Sialupe, including the excavations of the several contexts – ceramic production and metalworking areas – in which different forms of fuel can be identified by subsequent analyses of their wood charcoal and other organic macroremains. These chapters are succinct, drawing as necessary upon 11 appendices in which the detail of archaeobotanical analyses and identification criteria are set out. As already alluded to, they contain much information which will be of great use to those who wish to follow the trail blazed by this book’s author towards a properly informed understanding of ancient human ecology on the coast of Peru.
The book’s conclusion (Chapter 8) seeks to draw those ‘paleoethnobotanical interpretations’, advocated earlier by Goldstein, for his two main research questions: first, what does the fuel data tell us about Middle Sicán labour organization (and thus society); and second, what might it say about the ancient ecological setting and the possible impacts of craft production upon that setting. Goldstein is properly circumspect about the extent to which archaeobotanical data alone can be used to evaluate the ‘overall ecological footprint of Middle Sicán society’ (p. 91). For trees are, of course, a renewable resource, their exploitation can be managed. Human manipulation through pollarding and coppicing can increase the production of the woody biomass of the Prosopis species that dominates this dry forest ecology by up to six times. Given the sophistication of ancient agriculture practice in the Andes in its better-studied aspects, and indeed its long tradition of agroforestry techniques (see Reynel and Felipe-Morales, 1987), it is highly improbable that such woodland management was not practised during pre-Hispanic times (see Beresford-Jones, 2011). This hinders attempts to determine the impact of fuel consumption on woodland, or recreate the maturity and composition of the ancient woodland, from an anthropogenic assemblage of fuel remains. Indeed, one of the few criticisms I have of this book is that its subtitle turns out to be somewhat spurious. Just as Goldstein concludes, it requires multiproxy data sets, whose respective strengths and weaknesses can be set alongside each other, to reconstruct change in past ecological contexts. The great contribution of this very well-written study, then, is to show precisely how far one such data set – the archaeobotanical one – can be used to further our interpretations of ancient life-ways on the coast of Peru.