3.2.4. Types of products carried by caravans

Ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of the types of goods carried by llama caravans provides a context for discussing the volume of trade and spatial relationships in the prehispanic period. Nielsen (2000: 65-67) observed that caravan drivers transport virtually anything that they think they can transport and will be able to trade, and therefore the argument that certain caravans were transporting purely subsistence goods, while others carried purely prestige goods, is probably unfounded. Nielsen notes that as part of their diversification strategy, caravans in prehistory probably variously transported subsistence goods, cultural items, and prestige goods as they articulated with networks at different levels with a diversity of social associations.

Informative ethnohistoric evidence for caravan transport comes from reports describing the provisioning of the infamous silver mines at Potosí that are reviewed by Browman (1990: 408). These reports state that 40,000 llamas were reserved by Potosí for provisioning and another 60,000 were brought as support for indigenous workers fulfilling their tax obligations through labor. Although with these Potosí data it is difficult to extrapolate from the substantial transportation requirements for mining and ore milling, and the demands of the Spaniards overseeing the mining operations, to a conception of goods that may have circulated during prehispanic times, these data are informative on the variety of items mobilized for the mining effort. Goods included manufacturing items such as cloth, wool, wood and dung as fuel, and building supplies. Subsistence goods included potatoes and ch'uno,meat, maize and chicha, and various fruits and vegetables. Goods that could be classified as cultural / prestige items included herbs, medicines, stimulants including quantities of coca leaf, and hallucinogenics like ayahuasca(1990: 408).

In Mesoamerica, where cargo animals were not available, human bearers carried goods for hundreds of kilometers and canoe transport was used extensively. Drennan (1984: 110) observes that textiles may have represented a significant portion of the goods being transported long distance in the prehispanic period. Similarly, woolen textiles in the Andes were an important trade good for highland pastoralists and probably represented a substantial part of the goods offered for barter between pastoralist caravan drivers and agriculturalists from the beginning of the mutualistic relationship between pastoralists and agriculturalists. This demand for textiles would have been especially strong among agriculturalists living outside of the cotton-producing coastal area. The domestication of camelids for cargo transport sometime in the latter part of the Archaic allowed for more efficient transport of goods throughout the remainder of the prehispanic period. However, this is not to suggest that daily staples were transported, as in modern circumstances where fruits are trucked to the altiplano markets where they are bought for daily consumption.