Nasca Domestic Culture: the Significance of Past Environments for Reading the Material Culture of the South Coast of Peru

Abstract

Past environments of the south coast of Peru were significantly different from those prevailing today. Here, in one of the world's driest deserts, life flourished, as it does today, in riverine oases along the watercourses rising in the Andean hinterlands; and in ephemeral fog oases (lomas) along the littoral. These habitats were the foundation of agricultural and other adaptations that evolved here over millennia. In this paper we aim to reconstruct those past habitats and the huerta farms and orchards set amidst shady old-growth woodlands since these are the contexts in which we might hope to understand the sacred artistic canons of Paracas and Early Intermediate Period Nasca. We invoke the concept of “Nasca domestic nature” to reflect the continuum between wild and cultivated, resources and environments, observed empirically in traditional huerta farming and the archaeobotanical record, and also depicted with such wonderful fidelity in this iconographic canon.