PSE is a human ecology research project located in the District of Cuyo Cuyo, Department of Puno, Peru.

Fieldwork was conducted between 1984-1989. Analyses and publication continue into the present.

PSE was funded by the Cultural Anthropology & Geography Programs of the National Science Foundation (BNS# 83131). The project is a cooperative endeavor of the Programa Nacional de Sistemas Agrícolas Andinos, Lima, Peru, and the Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.

This multi-disciplinary project focused on questions of agricultural production, storage, and exchange in two Andean communities of farmer/herder/miners.

Team members bring differing ecological and economic perspectives to the question: How do households living in this difficult, high-altitude environment secure a reliable livelihood, and with what consequences for their nutrition and health? Authors of the monographs featured on this web site typically have lived in Cuyo Cuyo for a year or more, engaged in the ethnographic methodology of participant observation, along with more specific, quantitative types of investigation.

We are placing these monographs on the world wide web to facilitate scholarly exchange. Web-based publishing allows us to include multiple color photos, and to present in one (virtual) location and format highly detailed reports that would require multiple, expensive volumes in the traditional book format. As we add materials, we hope to create an extended anthropological case study, a multi-disciplinary ethnography that is unusually rich in its detail, variety of perspectives, and comparative potential, and that is accessible world-wide. We note that whatever their topical focus, all ethnographic reports focus on the same 20 households.

Within the "frame-and-scroll" format, we have preserved traditional pagination in order to facilitate citation. All materials appearing on this site, including photographs, are copyrighted by the authors.