Tuesday, 08/07/2025, 7:15 pm
Lecture Hall 2 (HS2), Kirchhoff Institute for Physics (KIP), INF 227, Heidelberg
Prof. Dr. Julia Meister (Bamberg University)
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.