The Hydraulic Hypothesis Revisited: Lake Titicaca Basin Raised Fields in Theoretical Perspective

Archaeological research over several decades has documented extensive areas of relict raised fields throughout the Americas. The existence of huge tracts of fields utilized in a context of complex political evolution has fostered a debate similar to the “hydraulic hypothesis” controversy, originated by Julian Steward and Karl Wittfogel over a generation ago. In this paper I assess recent research and offer a model that is tested with settlement and demographic data from the Juli-Pomata area of Lake Titicaca in southern Peru. The key variables of the model are differential levels of surplus production, the control of domestic labor by elite groups, and opportunistic economic strategies by the elite. The Juli-Pomata data support a causal link between complex political organization and the existence of labor-intensive raised-field systems. The simplistic explanations of the hydraulic hypothesis remain untenable, but I argue that more subtle causal relationships exist between political centralization and agricultural intensification.

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