The Andeana Persu also built 4.000 years of corn and drove trade with the lowlands.
The old Peru was the seat of highly developed Andean cultures; The most famous is the Incare. But there is little known about an important cornerstone of the development of these cultures: the transition from the Jager and collector’s culture to the sedentary farming society. In addition to the animal breeding also, the operation of agriculture, the cultivation of crops and trade with it. In the last ten years, the analysis of plant microfossils from excavation states in the lowlands of Sudamerikas has a lot advanced on the Pra-Colombian plant domestication and the dissemination of crops in the rainwales and other areas. However, what happened along the Andes, it is only opened.
Now archaoobiologists have found the so far of early evidence for the cultivation and processing of corn in a Neolithic Persitancy in Peru. They report in the current ie of Nature (Vol. 440 from 2.3.2006).
To the Hangen of Cerro Aycano
The Settlement Waynuna is located on the Hangen of Cerro Aycano on the Cotahuasi Valley in the district of Areaquipa in Sudperu. The Fruhen Residents Perus offered there favorable conditions for colonization: an upstream natural terrace, in the immediate vicinity of the other terraces are located as well as a static water driving fluid. In the nearby the obsidian deposit is Alca. The volcanic rock glass formed an important commodity that involves many Sud American civilizations inelectously to the Inca.
Excavation in Waynuna.
Waynuna is 3.625 meters high and thus at the interface of two ecological zones with different agricultural potential: on the high of 2.300 to 3.600 meters can take place maize. Between 3.600 and 4.000 meters, in the cow’s highland zone, thrive tuber waxes like the potato. For several years, archaologists ditch in Waynuna. Now has a research team around Linda Perry from the Archaeobiology Program of the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution a 4.000 years old farmhouse of settlement on microfossils examined by plants. In the fusion and on stone tools, the scientists were found. They discovered the strong cores of three crops: corn, potato and arrow root. The most commonly stimulates on remains of corn, also in the form of phytoliths (from plant residues created sedimentary rock) made of cornblaters and corncobs.
Trade in the lowlands
These discoveries are interesting in several ways: which concerns the history of maize cultivation in the Andes, has so far only considered to be secured that there before 2.500 years of corn was grown. However, the corners of cornstart prove that corn there before about 4.000 years used as food. The morphological characteristics of the identified strong cores even prove that the Fruben Andeanrooms dermobes from two different corn species. The leaf and corncolor radios show that he was grown and processed there.
Even the fossil remnants of the arrow root allow interesting jerks too. Arrow root is a wax of the tropical rainforest and thrives only up to a high of 1.000 meters. So it can not have been grown in Waynuna. The plants come, so suspected Perry, from the further of the available Amazon rainforest. There are numerous evidence for the fact that the inhabitants of the lowlands operated at the obsidian of the ALCA occurrence, so it is very likely that they also present their foods there on this occasion.
"The arrow root remains are the early empirical proof of the transport of hands and people from the eastern deepland areas in the Andean Highlands," writes Perry. "This good deal is a cornerstone for the models of the civilization process in Andean Highlands from the first start to the Inca, but so far lacked direct evidence from the highlands."
That other foods from the lowlands, Z. B. Achira, peanuts and maniok, to the important commercial goods between high and low and lowlands payable, prove so far only iconographic representations.
Geographical location of Waynuna
The geographical location that can be close to the water and the position as a transitional biotope (Okoton) in which both corn and tuber waxing can be grown, Waynuna for the Fruhen andinian farmers to a particularly attractive settlement place. Archaobotanic data obtained in this region demonstrate that settlements were preferred at the interface of corn and tuber wax cultivation over a long time.