Resumen:
: Changes in land-use practices have been a central element of human adaptation to Holocene
climate change. Many practices that result in the short-term stabilization of socio-natural systems,
however, have longer-term, unanticipated consequences that present cascading challenges for human
subsistence strategies and opportunities for subsequent adaptations. Investigating complex sequences
of interaction between climate change and human land-use in the past—rather than short-term causes
and effects—is therefore essential for understanding processes of adaptation and change, but this
approach has been stymied by a lack of suitably-scaled paleoecological data. Through a highresolution paleoecological analysis, we provide a 7000-year history of changing climate and land
management around Lake Acopia in the Andes of southern Peru. We identify evidence of the onset
of pastoralism, maize cultivation, and possibly cultivation of quinoa and potatoes to form a complex
agrarian landscape by c. 4300 years ago. Cumulative interactive climate-cultivation effects resulting in
erosion ended abruptly c. 2300 years ago. After this time, reduced sedimentation rates are attributed
to the construction and use of agricultural terraces within the catchment of the lake. These results
provide new insights into the role of humans in the manufacture of Andean landscapes and the
incremental, adaptive processes through which land-use practices take shape.
