Exploitation of coastal fishery resources laid the groundwork and provided continuing support for the development of advanced culture in pre-Hispanic coastal Peru. Such is the thesis proposed by the author of the monograph under review. Although the evidence is too fragmentary to support her contention, she does demonstrate a strong interdependence between the agricultural and fishing communities. Rostworowski’s main contribution is her careful investigation of how use of coastal resources was modified by imposition of Spanish institutions. Weaving together material gleaned from published and unpublished documents of the early colonial period as well as from modern archaeological, ethnological, and ecological studies, she shows how changes wrought by the conquest altered the relationship between man and his natural environment and contributed to the long-run deterioration of the latter.
The study is divided into two parts: the first describes the natural resources of the coastal region; the second, the organization and technology of the fishing community. A chapter dealing with the interdependence of fishermen and farmers, and another describing the roles of their gods and myths, conclude the work. Appended are the text of a sixteenth-century royal decree regulating exploitation of salt deposits and a series of seventeenth-century coastal charts.
