Shellfish Diplomacy
By trading shellfish for water rights, two ancient Peruvian cultures seem to have avoided war.
Sixty kilometers is a long way to walk for a clambake, but that’s what brought people to a village called Salitre, in Central Peru, for a span of 140 years in the 15th century.
Salitre was an outpost of the Chancay people, a small village on a trade route that led from the arid Pacific coast, up the Huanangue River valley, and into the foothills of the Andes. Just a few kilometers upstream and across the river from Salitre was another village, once home to the Chaupiyungino people, now known to archaeologists as Campo Libre.
Kasia Szremski, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has excavated both Salitre and Campo Libre, and in the process discovered something fascinating about how the two peoples may have kept the peace during a time of war. Read more.
