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Cuisine and Social Differentiation in Late Pre-hispanic Cajamarca Highlands of Northern Peru

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Andean Foodways

Part of the book series: The Latin American Studies Book Series ((LASBS))

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Abstract

Cuisine, the shared patterns of food preparation techniques and contexts of consumption, is a critical factor in addressing questions of community, social, and political organization, identity, and status differentiation. In the Cajamarca region of the northern Andean highlands, spatial patterning in both food remains and the ceramics involved in their cooking and serving are beginning to shed light on these aspects of social life at the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–AD 1465) fortified community of Yanaorco. Patterning in excavated food resources and ceramics indicate that, in addition to spatial and architectural differentiation, household social status was also marked by variation in the daily activities and practices of domestic cuisine. These patterns are most evident in differential access to camelid resources, variability in the state of faunal elements after cooking, and inter-household differences in the ratios of particular storage, cooking, and serving vessel forms. The utility of the organizing concept of cuisine is that it provides a holistic, multidimensional, and comparative means of evaluating social and political variation within households and communities, where its daily practice would have worked to both produce and reproduce social patterns that in some cases integrated the community, while in others internally divided it.

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Acknowledgements

The fieldwork upon which this paper is based took place over three seasons (2003, 2004, and 2012) under permit of the Peruvian Ministry of Culture in Lima and Cajamarca. These investigations were supported generously by Fulbright Hays, the University of Wyoming, and the University of California Santa Barbara. The project was co-directed by Jimmy Bouroncle, Claudia Iturry, and the author, and was assisted in the field by Peruvian and North American students as well as the people of Tamiacocha. Finally, I am indebted to several anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and insightful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WI, USA

    Jason L. Toohey

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Correspondence to Jason L. Toohey .

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  1. Botanical Research Institute of Texas, Fort Worth, TX, USA

    John E. Staller

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Toohey, J.L. (2021). Cuisine and Social Differentiation in Late Pre-hispanic Cajamarca Highlands of Northern Peru. In: Staller, J.E. (eds) Andean Foodways. The Latin American Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51629-1_5

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