Una planta de dependencias ecológicas, tecnológicas y sociales: reflexiones sobre la emergencia de Gossypium barbadense como planta textil

• Autores: Alday, Camila, Beresford-Jones, David
• Formato: artículo
• Fecha de Publicación: 2024
• Institución: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
• Repositorio: PUCP-Institucional
• Lenguaje: español
• OAI Identifier: oai:repositorio.pucp.edu.pe:20.500.14657/202394
• Enlace del recurso: https://revistas.pucp.edu.pe/index.php/boletindearqueologia/article/view/28492/26797; https://doi.org/10.18800/boletindearqueologiapucp.202402.002
• Nivel de acceso: acceso abierto
• Materia: Archaeobotany of textile plants; Cotton; Preceramic Period; Dependencies; Textile-labour; Arqueobotánica de plantas textiles; Algodón; Periodo Precerámico; Dependencias; https://purl.org/pe-repo/ocde/ford#6.01.02

When approached as raw textile materials, plants provide a window onto the cultural dynamics of the Pacific coast. Cotton (Gossypium barbadense), whose origin dates back around 6000 years ago in South America, became an essential textile resource for the manufacture of netting, fishing utensils, and artifacts. When cotton wass introduced into plant fibre technologies, it triggered not only a transition from an economy of immediate-return of wild plants such as Typha sp., Scirpus sp., and Asclepias sp., to an economy of G. barbadense cultivation; it also became a resource that gave rise to new dependencies. To understand cotton as a catalyst for change in ecological, technological, and social relations is to re-signify this plant as a protagonist in the social dynamics of the Preceramic Period. This paper discusses how the initial use of cotton promoted dynamics of ecological, economic, and therefore social dependencies during the Preceramic Period on the Pacific coast. This article is an invitation to reflect on the contribution of the Preceramic Period and the scope of archaeobotany of textile plants for the study of early textile dynamics in the Andean region. More importantly, cotton provides a unique example for the study of the connection between the origins of plant cultivation and the development of textile-labor in South America.