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Nature and scope of the doctoral thesis

• Student: Francisco Ferreira
• Supervisor: Dr Katie Willis
• Advisers: Dr Colin McEwan and Dr Frank Meddens

Agricultural practices are the most important ways in which Andean communities transform the landscape. These practices are based not only on indigenous knowledge of the natural environment, but are also embedded within a distinctively Andean body of knowledge relating systematic astronomical observation to the agricultural cycle. Landscape and landscape elements play a key role within this cosmology, as well as within the performance of agricultural rituals to ensure soil fertility and good harvests.

Andean cosmology is neither ahistorical nor aspatial; practices are played out in particular times and places. This PhD project will examine the nature of agricultural rituals in present-day highland Peru, focusing on community understandings of the relationships between the landscape and agriculture, and how these belief systems underpin agricultural practices and associated rituals. External interventions, such as government policies, NGO activities and circular migration, are all likely to have had an influence on such activities. This may have led to processes of hybridisation, or the existence of parallel understandings which are mobilised under different circumstances.

This research will be based within two communities in the Peruvian Andes and the main research methods will be interviews, oral histories and ethnography. Formal interviews with community leaders will provide information about agricultural cycles and rituals, while more informal interviews with community members will provide insight into the reasons for particular practices and rituals. Oral histories will be vital for an understanding of change over time. Observations of day-to-day agricultural practices as well as rituals will be crucial for an understanding of how interview responses are reflected in actual practices within the landscape. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which sacred places, such as ushnus, feature in present-day agricultural rituals.

Relationship to the main research project

Existing archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence points to the importance of ushnus for agricultural rituals in the Peruvian Andes during the Inca period. This project will examine this evidence in more depth, as well as considering more explicitly the role that ushnus played in the construction and maintenance of the Inca empire.

The PhD research will focus on present-day agricultural rituals and how these fit into local understandings of landscape and environment. The two communities studied will be associated with two of the six ushnus that will be excavated and examined as part of the wider project. This will allow possible links to be made between the ways in which local communities use and understand the ushnus today, and the evidence collected through the excavations and ethnohistorical research.

The focus of the PhD topic on agricultural rituals in a broader sense, may also help to shed light on past uses and meanings of the ushnus. Rituals, practices and understandings are dynamic, and while Andean cosmology is still of vital importance among highland communities in Peru, its elements have changed since Incan times. Examining the role of ritual performances and ritual spaces (other than the ushnus) within agriculture in present-day highland Peru will provide insights into how the landscape and landscape elements were interpreted and used when the ushnus were constructed. For example, previous research by some of the project team has identified the existence of human-created soil layers within some high altitude ushnus, which will be examined in relation to present-day practices of ground-breaking during annual agricultural cycles.