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The Rise and Fall of Wiñaymarka: Rethinking Cultural
and Environmental Interactions in the Southern Basin of Lake Titicaca
Maria C. Bruno
1
&José M. Capriles
2
&Christine A. Hastorf
3
&Sherilyn C. Fritz
4
&D. Marie Weide
4
&Alejandra I. Domic
5
&
Paul A. Baker
6
Accepted: 9 February 2021
#The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021
Abstract
Investigations of how past human societies managed during times of major climate change can inform our understanding of
potential human responses to ongoing environmental change. In this study, we evaluate the impact of environmental variation on
human communities over the last four millennia in the southern Lake Titicaca basin of the Andes, known as Lake Wiñaymarka.
Refined paleoenvironmental reconstructions from new diatom-based reconstructions of lake level together with archaeological
evidence of animal and plant resource use from sites on the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia, reveal frequent climate and lake-level
changes within major cultural phases. We posit that climate fluctuations alone do not explain major past social and political
transformations but instead that a highly dynamic environment contributed to the development of flexible and diverse subsistence
practices by the communities in the Titicaca Basin.
Keywords Lake Titicaca .Human-environmental interactions .Lake-level change .Subsistence diversification .Environmental
archaeology .Bolivia .Peru
Introduction
The study of past human-environmental relationships in differ-
ent settings globally has been integral to defining the
Anthropocene (Erlandson and Braje 2013) and informing deci-
sions of how human communities might respond more effective-
ly to the ongoing climate crisis (Barnes et al. 2013;Redman
et al. 2004). The first generation of large-scale, interdisciplinary
archaeological and paleoenvironmental studies, while ground-
breaking, often had low temporal and spatial resolution, which
rendered their correlation imprecise. Moreover, sometimes the
records were interpreted simplistically to suggest that climate
variability was the major influence on the rise and fall of ancient
societies (Contreras 2016;Rosen2007). Increasingly collabora-
tive projects among paleoscientists are improving the quality of
data collection, synthesis, and interpretation of past human-
environmental interactions, resulting in more nuanced, less de-
terministic interpretations that consider a variety of scales and
tempos of climatic and societal change (Dincauze 2000).
The Lake Titicaca Basin (16°S, 69°W, 3810 m.a.s.l.) in the
Andes of South America has a long, dynamic history of study
into human-environmental relationships. Beginning in the late
1980s, large-scale interdisciplinary archaeological and
paleoenvironmental studies produced the first generation of
hypotheses about the relationship between regional climate
change and human communities in this high and dry, yet pro-
ductive, region (Abbott et al. 1997;Bakeret al. 2005; Baker
et al. 2001;Binfordet al. 1997; Kolata 1993,1996; Janusek
2003;Rigsbyet al. 2003). Building on these studies, climate
change was invoked to explain the appearance of agriculture
here around 2000 BCE (Aldenderfer 2009;Marsh2015),
shifts in socio-political centers and economic practices in the
*Maria C. Bruno
brunom@dickinson.edu
1
Department of Anthropology & Archaeology,DickinsonCollege, 28
N. College St., Carlisle, PA 17013, USA
2
Department of Anthropology, The Pennsylvania State University,
State College, PA 16802, USA
3
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley,
232 Anthropology and Art Practice Building, Berkeley, CA 94720,
USA
4
Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and School of
Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln,
Lincoln, NE 68588, USA
5
Department of Anthropology and Department of Geosciences, The
Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA 16802, USA
6
Division of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Duke University,
Durham, NC 27708, USA
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-021-00222-3
/ Published online: 10 March 2021
Human Ecology (2021) 49:131–145
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.