Pre-Hispanic North Coast Cultures and Foodways

To more fully understand the intersections of food and cultural ecology among north coast societies, one must delve into the rich history of the region. The particular landscapes of Peru’s north coast hosted almost 15 millennia of human settlement, spanning the varied early hunter-gatherer communities of the Late Pleistocene, the early complex societies of the Formative, the maritime agricultural economies, and ritual complexes of polities including the Cupisnique, Moche, and Sican and the Chimu state. By the time the Lambayeque Valley Complex was incorporated into the expansionist highland Inka Empire in the fifteenth century, it boasted its own unique and well-established economic networks, ideological systems, and political hierarchies. This chapter describes this long history of in situ and autochthonous cultural development, synthesizing a broad swath of archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence and paying particular attention to the role of foodways and subsistence regimes in producing and reproducing culture.