The Andes, it is often asserted, are different: manifestly so in how their tremendous altitudes, lying through tropical latitudes, compress enormous ecological diversity across relatively short horizontal distances to the lowlands of Amazonia; and immanently too through the unique cultural trajectories that unfolded there—not least in how their communities met their material needs through the “dismal science” of economics. Ever since Karl Polanyi's ideas were crystallized in Andean ethnography by John Murra, interactions elsewhere driven by vulgar commerce were, in the Andes, characterized rather by redistribution and reciprocity, finding ultimate expression in the proto-Marxist central control of the Inca Empire. The seeming absence of market exchange or currency in one of the world's largest polities at the time has long been explained through various expressions of ecological complementarity, most famously through Murra's “verticality” model, whereby communities strove to achieve direct access to a diversity of agricultural and other products by structuring themselves across altitudinal tiers. While questions have since been asked of how pervasive such models were across ancient Andean time and space and attempts to pin down ethnographic analogy in the archaeological record proved generally elusive, the ideal of verticality remains one of the most enduring theories of ancient Andean economy. Sea Shells in the Mountains and Llamas on the Coast offers one of the most comprehensive archaeological evaluations yet of the verticality concept, but perhaps even more remarkably, does so in the context of an archaeological “culture” long emblematic of the Peruvian coast—Paracas.
Famous through the corpus of beautiful ancient textiles excavated in the 1920s by Julio C. Tello on the eponymous south coast peninsula, the people and society(ies) who made these extraordinary artifacts have been almost overshadowed by the very glamor of their material culture. Long defined by analyses of its rich, coastal mortuary contexts, understanding of Paracas is now being broadened by large-scale investigations of valleys both north and south of the Paracas Peninsula, including the German Archaeological Institute's Nasca-Palpa Archaeological Project directed by Marcus Reindel and Johnny Isla, from which Christian Mader's book emerges. And, just as its title encapsulates, by Late Paracas (ca. 200 BC) that character turns out to embrace the entire western Andean flank, from the Pacific littoral to the high puna above 4,000 m asl.
Sea Shells in the Mountains and Llamas on the Coast begins with reviews of Andean human ecological diversity following Pulgar Vidal's classifications and the economic models postulated for interchanges across that diversity, including an excellent synthesis of the evolution of Murra's verticality concept, followed by a history of Paracas studies and the ongoing uncertainties about its geographical scale, sociopolitical nature, and even cultural history. Having set the stage, Mader then proceeds with his main task of bringing sorely needed economic perspective to Paracas through analyses of three lines of evidence: obsidian lithics, marine and terrestrial mollusks, and camelid bones. These data derive from extensive area excavations of three major settlements at Juaranga (285 m asl), Collanco (1,630 m), and Cutamalla (3,300 m), along with excavations at eight other Paracas sites—all unfolding from more than two decades worth of survey and investigation by the Nasca-Palpa Archaeological Project. It is this very rare context of truly comprehensive archaeological investigation right across the Andean altitudinal transect that gives this study's data particular meaning. By way of illustration, density values for excavated materials that Mader uses will inevitably vary enormously between particular archaeological contexts, and yet will average out to give meaningful comparators in excavations on these scales, just as he shows.
Each of these lines of evidence is then elaborated through some meticulously documented analyses including, inter alia, provenance and chaîne opératoire analyses of more than 2,000 obsidian artifacts to ascertain how these materials were worked through the courses of journeys from their source at 4,100 m asl at Quispisisa / Jichja Parco down across the Paracas world; the identification and quantification of mollusks to track their movement inland in significant quantities more than 60 km from the ocean and lomas, and as artifacts even up to the high sierra; and last, but not least, analyses of the remains of the beasts of burden that articulated Paracas mobility, including strontium isotope analyses of the teeth of 30 camelids from the Palpa Valley, showing that these were likely raised in the highlands.
Mader's interpretations of these data are strictly, even fastidiously qualified, but it will doubtless disappoint anthropologists of the past that he can discern no evidence for verticality expressed through Murra's vertical archipelago model, sensu stricto, or for interactions in Paracas driven much by redistribution or reciprocity. Instead of archipelagos of colonies, what emerges is ecological complementarity through the aegis of long-distance exchanges articulated by intense camelid caravans throughout an entirely Paracas landscape (for which Mader coins the term “economic directness”). By Late Paracas this landscape, as documented by the Nasca-Palpa Archaeological Project, had become peppered with dozens of settlements of different scales along rivers and atop ridgelines, all sharing in a material culture yet also exhibiting increasing evidence of internecine conflict. For me this begs additional questions about how long-distance mobility was pursued within such a milieu and indeed what that might mean for the nature of Late Paracas society and economy.
Sea Shells in the Mountains and Llamas on the Coast is founded on the fixed, tangible elements of the past excavated from particular places, yet the patterns drawn from those data are those of movement between those places. Mader himself has walked the 200 km of Paracas routeways from the high Andean obsidian sources at Quispisisa, via many of the settlements studied such as Collanco, down to the Pacific shore at the estuary of the Río Grande de Nazca. With this excellent study he has reanimated ancient Paracas for us and moreover has done so over hitherto unrecognized geographies.
