In Gillin’s ethnographic account of the town of Moche, he observed that many dishes were cooked or boiled over an open flame, either in ceramic or metal containers placed on an adobe brick stove or on rock supports placed on the ground. Gillin lists a variety of one pot meals, including soups, stews, or gruels, which often contained meat, maize , manioc, and/or beans. Typical kitchens contained ceramic cooking vessels, water storage jars, chicha fermentation jars, cooking hearths , fuels , woven reed or cane fans for igniting or intensifying cooking fires, grinding stones and pestles , wooden utensils, and various serving implements made from gourds including scoops, plates, and bowls. Gillin also points out that essential ceramic and ground stone implements were commonly acquired from nearby archaeological sites, and praised by the local population at the town of Moche as being the best quality kitchen tools. In my research in the Moche Valley for this dissertation project, I have been invited into homes and served meals in kitchen setups mirroring those described above, including stews of meat , maize, and beans cooked over open hearths in Chimu pots that smallholders recovered in their fields. It is likely that a variety of food preparation and processing techniques were implemented in the Moche Valley during the EIP, including boiling , roasting, steaming, parching, toasting , drying, soaking, and grinding.
Rowe describes how toasted maize, or cancha, was a popular food at the time of Spanish conquest in Peru .Water was considered important for irrigation,mobile vertical grow table food preparation, and bathing, but not for drinking; distaste for drinking water has been documented widely in the Andes . According to Gillin , many families drank chicha rather than water, and many women also used chicha for boiling meats and vegetables. It is likely that chicha production occurred regularly at domestic habitation sites in the Moche Valley in the past, for quotidian uses in addition to feasting events. Indeed, chicha would have remained potable longer through the process of boiling, and also would have reduced sickness due to contamination of the water supply. Chicha production would have required a specific set of tasks associated preparation/processing; to brew maize chicha, germinated maize is dried, ground, mixed with water, and fermented, to create an alcoholic liquid .Alongside maize, similar shifts in ubiquity values are noted for members of the Fabaceae family. Some members of the Fabaceae family present in the five Moche Valley assemblages could be identified to the genus or species level, including domesticated legumes , along with a number of weedy legumes. However, some remains only could be identified to the family level if they lacked clear diagnostic attributes to aid in more specific identification. For example, common beans and peanuts share many of the same attributes; if an attachment scar was not present, then it was impossible to determine the difference between these two taxa. As the common bean and peanut represent different genera, these specimens were recorded as “Fabaceae,” although noted as probable domesticated beans.
Domesticated Fabaceae, including common beans, lima beans, and peanuts, have low ubiquity values across the study sites , likely due to preservation bias. As beans are consumed in their entirety after cooking, they are less likely to appear in archaeological assemblages than plant foods that require processing . Indeed, no clear domesticated beans were identified in the La Poza or MV-83 assemblages . A number of partial or complete domesticated bean fragments were present in the MV-224, MV-225, and MV-83 assemblages; in addition, some specimens that could only be classified to the family level of Fabaceae likely represent domesticated forms, but lacked diagnostics to distinguish between common bean, peanut, and pacay. However, the lack of domesticated beans at La Poza and MV-83, when considered in relation to overall Fabaceae presence, may have some implication for cropping strategies. If we group all of the Fabaceae for each assemblage together and chart ubiquity values through time , we see an increase from 23.5 percent ubiquity at La Poza to 58.1 percent at MV-224. This ubiquity trend remains fairly consistent across the remaining three study sites through time, with Fabaceae ubiquity values of 56.2 percent, 55.6 percent, and 50 percent for MV-225, MV-83, and Galindo, respectively. I interpret these trends along two lines, suggesting that the increases in Fabaceae may represent increased collection/incidental intrusion of weedy leguminous taxa that grow in and along fields as maize production increased, and possible intercropping of maize and beans. As discussed above, intercropping Phaseolus beans with maize would have provided benefits to both plants; nitrogen fixation from beans benefits maize plants, and beans benefit from having the maize stalks to climb during growth .
This pattern gives us pause to reconsider rigid taxonomic distinctions that give a taxon like chenopod a quintessential ‘highland’ identity in cuisine ; rather, interaction, melding, and movement between the coast and highlands, which likely involved the exchange of resources as well as knowledge of plant cultivation strategies, contributed to the formation of middle valley chaupiyunga cuisines. Furthermore, as food ways often are divided by social status, identity/ethnicity, or context, it seems problematic to attribute such a singular identity category as ‘highland’ to a particular food taxon. Another taxon of note is cotton. While ubiquity values for cotton are low at La Poza and MV-83 , no cotton seeds were recovered in the MV-224 and MV-225 assemblages. In contrast, cotton seeds have a very high ubiquity value in the Galindo samples. This trend is noteworthy in that it sheds light on practices related to an important economic activity, spinning and weaving. The fact that no cotton seeds were recovered in either the MV-224 or MV-225 assemblages indicates that cotton fiber textile production may not have been practiced widely at these sites. This issue may be a result of preservation bias, as cotton seeds may be less likely to enter fires than food taxa; however, carbonized cotton seeds were recovered in the other middle valley assemblages , including in very high ubiquity at Galindo. Ringberg reports the presence of ceramic disk spindle whorls known as torterosand pirurosin patio spaces at MV-225, suggesting that women, or possible children and elderly of both genders, used open, well-litpatio spaces for spinning and weaving.
Although the sample size of torteros at MV-225 was small, ethnographic evidence suggests that large tortero whorls were used on the Peruvian north coast to ply heavier fibers into rope or twine . Wooden spindle whorls may have been used for this purpose as well . The lack of cotton seeds in the archaeobotanical assemblage at MV-225 may indicate that camelid fiber spinning took precedence over cotton fiber spinning during the Gallinazo/Early Moche phases. Indeed, the highland occupants of MV-225 houses and tended camelids, a tradition that continued at MV-83 and Galindo. Amber VanDerwarker found that camelids were the main source of meat at MV-83, and that households processed the whole animal for consumption, in contrast to obtaining dried meat or leg meat. These animals were likely used for their wool in addition to meat. The presence of camelids at these middle valley sites also challenges long-standing typologies that categorize such as animals as exclusively ‘highland’ in nature —as the local costeño occupants of MV-224 appear to have interacted and likely intermarried and cohabitated with serrano colonists, they likely bred and herded camelids as well for wool and meat. Future analyses of faunal assemblages from MV-224 and MV-225 will likely clarify the nature of these dynamics. With respect to ubiquity overall, Galindo witnessed a greater range of taxa that are highly ubiquitous in the assemblage as compared to the other assemblages, which are dominated by five or less taxa. However, the Galindo archaeobotanical dataset is made up of only ten samples. While this sample number meets Hubbard’s minimum threshold for ubiquity calculation , having fewer samples more severely skews frequency scores of rare taxa. As a result, I interpret rare taxa ubiquity values with caution. I will use the taxon of coca as an example. Coca is a special use taxon; it is neither ubiquitous nor abundant in the Moche Valley samples. Indeed, only one coca seed was recovered in the MV-225 assemblage,mobile vertical farm and four coca seeds total were recovered from the Galindo assemblage .
The paucity of coca in these deposits likely is related to preservation biases. Coca leaves are chewed raw , and stems and seeds are separated before the bola, or wad of leaves, is placed in the mouth for chewing. In the of context quotidian routines, coca chewing likely would have been done along walks to agricultural fields or when laboring in fields, to provide energy and to act as an appetite suppressant. Coca seeds are therefore unlikely to be burned and dropped in cooking fires and therefore are less likely to leave behind carbonized remains at domestic habitation sites. It is likely that the residents of these Moche Valley sites grew and consumed coca, particularly the residents of the Middle Valley sites; indeed, the middle valley sites are located within primary production zones for coca for the valley determined by agroecological zonation models . While conducting research for this dissertation in the Moche Valley, I frequently noticed the presence of coca in family smallholdings and community gardens throughout the middle valley . In their analysis of oral health indicators and phytoliths from dental calculus, Gagnon et al. argue that coca use decreased among the coastal skeletal population buried at Cerro Oreja from the Salinar to Gallinazo phases; they attribute this pattern to the occupation of the coca-growing regions of the Moche Valley by highlanders during the Gallinazo phase. Ethnohistorical research has documented that control of limited coca fields was an important source of wealth and a site of conflict between coastal and highland groups in this region , dynamics Billman argues extended deeper into the past . It would be intriguing to compare the coastal skeletal population at Cerro Oreja to an EIP highland burial population to test this hypothesis .
Regardless, coca probably was an important resource consumed by residents of the Moche Valley during the Gallinazo/Early Moche phases, including highland colonists; the fact that coca is unlikely to be preserved in carbonized form appears to be the reason for its paucity in the Moche Valley samples. Returning to the ubiquity problem noted above, the single coca seed recovered at MV-225 out of 143 samples produced a ubiquity value of 0.7 percent, whereas the four coca seeds recovered at Galindo out of 10 samples produced a ubiquity value of 10 percent. Represented by one and four specimens at MV-225 and Galindo, respectively, it cannot be said that coca was truly more abundant or used more widely at Galindo than MV-225, although ubiquity values might cause a reader to infer otherwise. In summary, a basic assessment of the plant assemblages from the five Moche Valley sites reveals some broad similarities in the types of plants collected and produced; and the importance of maize relative to other taxa at the sites. Despite these similarities, however, quantitative analysis reveals significant differences in terms of the standardized counts of different plant food categories, differences that allow us to offer insight into the nature of subsistence shifts related to maize and other cultigen intensification. To further explore changes in plant use through time, I turn to an exploratory data analysis using box plots to assess statistical difference between the five Moche Valley assemblages. As discussed above, if the notched areas of any of the boxes do not overlap, then the distributions are significantly different at the 0.05 level. Outliers are depicted as asterisks and far outliers as open circles. In some cases, distributions of smaller sample sizes will cause notched boxes to overextend and then fold back on themselves. All plots are logarithmically transformed. I initially began my analysis by comparing densities of maize, other cultigens, fruits, and miscellaneous/wild resources across the five different sites. What I found was that every single plant category was represented in greater density at MV-83 than at the other sites. I therefore calculated total plant density, finding that there was a significant difference in the overall density of plant remains between MV- 83 and the other study sites . This pattern may reflect several things: better plant preservation, a change in the manner of plant deposition, a difference in disposal patterns, a reflection of higher settlement population in the areas sampled at MV-83 compared to the other study sites, etc. What is clear, however, is that density measures cannot speak to differences in plant diet/use in this particular comparison.