Integrated contextual approaches to understanding past activities using plant and animal remains from Kala Uyuni, Lake Titicaca, Bolivia

Abstract

For pragmatic reasons, separate specialists usually analyze plant and animal remains recovered in archeological sites. Animal bones and charred plant remains are the products of very different organisms and tissues, fragment differently, and are identified using very different characters (see Peres, this volume; Wright, this volume). Even so, a primary concern of the Taraco Archaeological Project (TAP) has been to integrate these archaeobiological datasets to better understand aspects of ancient lifeways in the Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes. © 2010 Springer-Verlag New York.