Ethnic and Demographic Structures and Processes

Abstract

One day people appeared in the mountains of the Andes who learned to live with the severe climatic conditions. They honoured the earth as a generous and patient mother who carried and protected its fruits in her womb. To grow plants as source of food does not simply mean to sow, sit down and wait. You have to loosen the soil and happily water it with your sweat. It means learning from the moon when you have to sow and to talk with the stars about seasons and frost, to befriend the clouds and to wait for the benign rains. Nobody taught our fathers how they had to treat nature. They learned by observing it, and the animals and insects were their first teachers. They learned to look for edible roots, the tasty fruit, the healing flower, the plant which clothes them. In this way, people experimented and discovered. And so they found what they needed and how to obtain it. The mountains of the Andes are not comfortable. There are places where the soil is hard as a stone. There are areas where the fog makes you blind, where the earth is dying of thirst. Land full of thorns, rocky slopes, icy glaciers and warm valleys; places where people could not live alone. Andean people built terraces to protect their crops. With canals dug into hard rock, they directed water to areas devoid of water. People learned to cultivate maize in protected niches, potatoes at higher places and bitter potatoes at icy altitudes.