Avaliação: El manejo del agua en los Andes : pasado, presente y futuro – Where the Apu meets the Cocha: the role of anthropic lakes and wetlands in the vertical archipelago

At the top of the Andes, in the high Cordillera Blanca, feeding relic glacial lake basins with water became a common albeit seldom documented strategy to increase water availability over the annual cycle from the late Formative Period onwards. Anthropic lakes and wetlands (cochas & bofedales or oconales) increasingly played a key part in regulating surface runoff and its sub-surface percolation, as well as in monitoring water availability in high mountain environments, especially during times of diminished or more erratic precipitation. They were also central to the constructed landscapes of many ceremonial centres in basin headwaters, both physically and symbolically.
This paper will address the organization of water management in the Andes by focusing on the role of mortuary and ceremonial communities in the management of anthropic lakes and wetlands as sources of water for irrigation in the Ancash and Llullán basins of northern Peru during later Andean prehistory. Based on results of archaeological excavations at the sites of Keushu and Awkismarka and regional survey across the Cordillera Blanca and Negra, it will present and compare histories of landscape transformations with the development of ritual, sacred landscapes.
In connecting the techné of interbasin canal construction for gravity irrigation with the emerging logos of the mortuary landscape by addressing the movement of water and people through the landscape it aims to recast the hydraulic technology controlling the flow of water through the landscape as an increasingly important factor structuring social integration and interaction within and across ecological gradients.

• Andean archaeology
• hydraulic technology
• anthropic lakes
• mortuary landscapes
• vertical archipelago