Rethinking the role of wild resources in agriculturalist societies: Archives from rockshelter cases of Northwestern Argentina

Abstract

Analytical dichotomies are common in archaeology: while domesticated continues to be a powerful tool for explaining changes in hunter and gatherer transitional economies, wild remains an understudied and more complicated category in relation to societies that produce their own food. This strong differentiation between farming and foraging lifestyles is particularly problematic in the archaeology of rockshelter occupations of Northwestern Argentina. Here I interrogate the concepts of wild and domestic and the ideas associated with the role of such plants in people’s lives through an examination of plant remains from these rockshelters. Although I consider the plants present from the hunter–gatherer occupations, I am particularly interested in the “wild” species associated with the societies long–established as agriculturalists and pastoralists that also utilized these spaces. In doing so, we see that wild resources were vitally important, sometimes even more so than domesticated ones, among complex societies from the Formative Period up through Inca rule, and even into the present.