Camelids as Food and Wealth: Emerging Political and Moral Economies of the Recuay Culture

Abstract

Camelids have long played a key role in assessing the economies of Andean groups, not least in discussions of key anthropological themes such as domestication, diet, exchange, and verticality. Most discussions have focused on human intervention in animal use—most commonly how animals are incorporated and used by humans in their economic worlds. In this paper, I want to shift emphasis and examine how camelids came to be part of a mutually constitutive socio-cultural system. Two faunal assemblages (one from a small village and the other a major fortified center) and art imagery are assessed to describe the uptake of intensive camelid herding/consumption practices in the Recuay culture (c. AD 1-700) and the dramatic cultural transformations that ensued. At the same time that hunting diminished greatly, the faunal materials indicate increasing reliance on camelids in diverse residential food practices, corporate feasts, and fiber production. Just as important, camelids become the signal expression of the emerging wealth and status of nobles, which drive the production of effigy ceramics, figurines, and camelid fiber garments. Rather than being epiphenomenal to social change, camelids were therefore active elements, indeed co-participants, which shaped the look and reproduction of an ancient Andean society.