Beyond State Collapse: Rural History, Raised Fields, and Pastoralism in the South Andes

The underlying rhythms of peasant society play an important role in shaping rural traditions in the wake of political collapse. Such a view has been a prominent theme in rural history since its bold development by French historian Marc Bloch in the 1930s, and it has a valuable role to play in contemporary anthropology and in the framing of current theory on state collapse. As state societies never collapse completely, nor equally in all their parts, it is the tenacity of rural society for survival that helps explain the restructuring of earlier state-level systems in a post-state setting. The view taken here is that social evolution is not just a "top-down" phenomenon, but also a "bottom-up" development, wherein rural society develops a new means of coping with emerging economic problems after state demise. The specific case examined is the continued construction and use of raised fields in the Lake Titicaca basin after the collapse of the Tiwanaku state. Raised fields, a highly productive technology geared toward high annual yields, continued to be built into the Late Intermediate period of the South Andes. One must ask why such a technology was implemented in the wake of state collapse and urban life. The answer posed here is that raised fields were a means of subsidizing pastoralism in the region of Lake Titicaca, and that post-state economic restructuring, which occurred collectively, voluntarily, and within the context of reciprocal kin relations, was aimed at maintaining camelid wealth.