It has been generally recognized at least since the '70s that different villages within the same region can have very different patterns of growth over time (cf. [Winter 1976]). This is certainly the case on the Taraco Peninsula. We will see many examples in which different villages and site clusters and even regions grow at drastically different rates during the same phase. How are we to interpret these differences?
A particularly striking - though by no means unique - example is the LF1 period described in Chapter 7. At this time, one site in particular grew very rapidly, at a rate of 0.17% annually. This is more than twice the growth rate of the population of the Taraco Peninsula as a whole (0.08%, Table 7.2). There are three factors that can affect population growth rates:
We are now presented with the difficulty of explaining what form this population movement took, and what were the specific motivations of the persons who chose to change their residence. There are many possible explanations, of course. On the one hand, it is easy to imagine a situation in which people are forced to move from one place to another. This almost certainly accounts for some of the dramatic population movement which occurred when the Inka Empire conquered the Titicaca Basin (this is discussed in Chapter 10). The Inka empire was certainly acquainted with the practice of forced relocation of populations. However, it is difficult to imagine forced relocation of population in the absence of a state structure, as was the case in the Formative Period Titicaca Basin. The observed population growth differentials can therefore only be interpreted as the result of human individuals or small groups deciding to leave one settlement or community and take up residence in another.
Given the long time periods involved, such population growth differentials would not even necessarily imply the relocation of established households from one community to another. For example, if we imagine that post-marital residence rules were at least somewhat flexible, and that village exogamy was a common practice, we could postulate a slight preference on the part of newlyweds to establish a new household in the village of one of the partners rather than in that of the other. Over centuries, this could certainly produce the observed effect, but as a result only of a systematic bias in decision frequencies within a particular social frame. I believe this type of process was probably more common than was mass relocation, particularly earlier in the Formative Period, before large political formations had come into being (see especially Chapters 6 and 7).
The point of the preceding paragraphs is this: the unequal growth rates which can be documented in various phases in the Taraco Peninsula archaeological sequence are evidence of systematic biases in human decision-making. We are observing the results of people making decisions within a determinate economic, social, and cultural context. We have therefore, somewhat inadvertently, entered into a discussion of the role of agency in human history and in social evolution (cf. [Dobres and Robb 2000]), and have stumbled upon a truth: settlement systems have no autonomy; they are created, in their every detail, by the informed, motivated and historically situated action of human beings. Surprisingly, then, we may use settlement data to address questions of human agency and choice. The dynamics of the settlement system, particularly relative rates of population growth of the various sites, informs us of broad patterns of bias in decisions regarding residential location.
Of course, this is a very restricted domain of agency, and would seem to be atypical in some regards. We are discussing a single kind of decision: residential choice. While many kinds of activity seem to be routinized and are undertaken with little or no discursive awareness (cf. [Dietler and Herbich 1998]), residential choice is a kind of decision which only occurs rarely, in many cases only once or twice in a lifetime. In addition, residential choice has significant ramifications for the future possibilities of a household or individual. The decision affects future social and alliance relations, as well as ease of access to a wide array of spatially concentrated or restricted resources, social, cultural and economic in nature. This being the case, it is likely that residential choices are virtually always made only subsequent to a conscious evaluation of the various alternatives and their implications. Thus, residential choice may respond to short-term conditions and political realities in a way that many kinds of human behavior do not.
Why might inhabitants of the Taraco Peninsula have systematically chosen to locate their households in one particular village more often than they chose to live in others? What are the factors which might have entered into their decision-making process? There are many possible answers to this question, of course, but I would like to discuss one in particular, since I will make use of it later on to interpret actual patterns of unequal population growth: redistribution.