Preceramic transhumance and andean food production

Thomas Lynch (1971) has recently attempted to document the fact that the preceramic hunter-gatherers of Peru were mobile throughout a range of altitudinal zones and that the fields of movement of these preceramic populations may well have been continuous, since the members of each group exploited the resources of different habitats in terms of regular annual cycles. However, it is equally clear that these long, linear fields of the preceramic populations began to be fragmented at some point in lime. We believe that the termination of the proposed period of transhumance constitutes an extremely interesting problem. At the present time this feature has been discussed only in terms of data from the Peruvian coast. In this paper we employ some of Lynch’s data and observations in an attempt to demonstrate (I) that a minimum of modification of the preceramic pattern of food procurement within the highlands was required to convert hunter-gatherers into food producers; and (2) wild tubers played a crucial role in this process.