AWASQA

Ubiquitous in life and death, mass-produced and extremely versatile in terms of pattern, color and choice of materials, Andean textiles attest to the social organization, symbolic believes and exchanges of non-literate preHispanic societies. Peru's north coast textiles have been manufactured with fibers of South American camelids since about 200 AD. For a long time, it was accepted, without direct proof, that the wool supply was restricted to the populations of 2 species (alpaca and vicuña) from the highlands. However, the other 2 camelid species (llama and guanaco) can also produce quality wool, and camelid remains have been found in lowland sites since at least 800 BC. AWASQA aims to diachronically describe 1) the chaine-opératoire for textiles from well-dated coastal archaeological sites and museum collections, 2) the taxonomic and geographical origin of animal fibers (raw material) through paleoproteomics and stable isotope analysis, and 3) the trajectory of local genetic lineages through a combined approach of paleogenomic and isotope analysis of archaeozoological remains. The combination of approaches developed by AWASQA is totally unprecedented and will make it possible to remove methodological obstacles, as the principle of actualism cannot be applied strictly to the pre-Hispanic period. Conceptually, we hypothesize that lowland societies overcame the severe environmental constraints they faced by adapting native highland pastoralism and developing their own production of raw materials. Our hypothesis questions the obligatory nature of certain exchanges between Andean ecological zones (the concept of Andean verticality).