Flexible Borders, Permeable Territories and the Role of Water Management in Territorial Dynamics in Pre-Hispanic and Early Hispanic Peru

The Peruvian Andes are well known for its ethnic and highly compressed ecological diversity. Ancient and modern Andean societies faced and continue to face various crises of climatic, social, political, or economic nature. Those crises forced the population to establish different types of inter-group relationships and identities, resulting in vast range of competitive/cooperative behaviors across the varied social and physical landscapes, including warfare, trade, alliance-building, co-residence, and any combinations of these and other practices. Judging by the results of systematic surveys and archaeological excavations run by the authors for the last 20 years, access to water resources has always been a major concern, especially in the vast desert areas on the coast of today's Peru. Using spatial, diachronic, and multidisciplinary approaches and employing fieldwork data from the archaeological sites of the province of Huarmey authors try to better understand the nature and outcome of distinct groups interacting across the varied social and physical landscapes of the desertic coast and highlands and how their different entanglements shaped the geo-political landscape of this area throughout the pre-Hispanic and early Hispanic periods.