Agustina Vazquez Fiorani

EMAILED: Agustina’s dissertation project investigated how the earliest Andean farmers and herders fed themselves and their families by establishing caring relationships with one another and their ancestors. Specifically, she examined how preparing and sharing food allowed early villagers in the Argentinian Andes (Tafí Valley, Formative Period [FP], ca. 200 BCE-AD 900) to craft new social relations of care and culinary reciprocity amongst themselves and their ancestors, which indexed broader relationships with wild and domesticated plants and animals. By combining archaeological chemistry, spatial and artifactual analysis, and experimental archaeology, Agustina examined the relational networks of social practice that weave bodies, materials, and foods together when sharing meals in specific spatial settings. Her research was conducted in Argentina and the United States, and encompassed the multiscalar analysis of more than 800 pots used by early villagers in Argentina. Results suggested that people living in different villages in the Tafí Valley crafted local foodways and culinary traditions, while sharing similar technological, mortuary, and architectural practices. Furthermore, the combination of lipid and phytolith analysis of ceramic pots indicates that the living might have consumed different animal and plant foods during socially and ritually charged events involving their ancestors than in their everyday lives. Currently, Agustina is exploring how these differences might have nurtured physical and social bodies, establishing a structure of care and reciprocity that enabled fledgling villager communities to persist successfully over time