Prof. Dr. Julia Meister (Universität Bamberg)
The Peruvanian Andes are among the world’s most impressive cultural landscapes of traditional terrace farming. The lecture explores these pre-Columbian terrace systems as long-term strategies for resource use and adaptation to semi-arid environmental conditions. The focus is on new geoarchaeological findings from the Laramate region (southern Peru), which provides insights into the construction, use and soil-ecological effects of pre-modern terrace systems. The results illustrate how local communities responded to environmental change and developed complex agricultural systems as resilient solutions. The interdisciplinary approach – from geomorphology to soil science and settlement archaeology – not only provides a differentiated picture of past human-environment interactions, but also impulses for current debates on sustainable land use in resource-limited mountain ecosystems.
