Compositional Characterization of Ceramic Artefacts and Clays: the utility of INAA to evaluate the prehispanic integration between the Puna and the Bolsón of Fiambalá area, Northwestern Argentina (Dpto. Tinogasta, Catamarca, Argentina)

17) NORMA RATTO, GUILLERMO DE LA FUENTE, RITA PLÁ, MARTÍN ORGAZ Y MÓNICA MORENO

Amsterdam

Simposio; 33rd. International Symposium on Archaeometry; 2002

In this paper we discuss the significance for the Chaschuil region as a “goods, energy, and information corridor” during the span of time covering the agricultural-pottery making societies until the Inka presence in the region, thus seeing the region as one of the circulation routes integrating the eastern and western territories to both sides of the Andean Southern Cordillera. Considering the structure of the regional archaeological record, the high basin of Chaschuil valley, located at the Southern Andean Puna, functioned in the past as a goods, energy, and information corridor, where the loci of higher artefact densities can be visualized as cores of a network, interconnecting at the regional and extra-regional level different archaeological installations and landscape units. According with the radiocarbon (C14) and termoluminiscense (TL) dates obtained for archaeological contexts and ceramic artefacts from the region under study -covering a temporal span of 800 radiocarbon years-, both agricultural-pottery making and state societies transported ceramic artefacts to the Chaschuil region manufactured with ceramic raw materials (clays) coming from a specific area into the Bolsón of Fiambalá: La Troya river, located at Abaucán valley. The present distance between these two areas, approximately 200 lineal km., let us think in the the caravan traffic mechanisms operating through time until the Inka presence at Chaschuil region (Plá et al. 1999, Plá and Ratto 2000, Ratto et al. 2001). A traffic mechanism is proposed by the models caravan-based for the pre-Inka times (Núñez and Dillehay 1979, Berenguer 1994, Núñez 1994). The underlying idea in these models is that the traffic of several goods was an important part of the political economy of these southern and central andean chiefdoms, with a base on the exchange of goods at the household level, which was growing through the time on a supra-community level (Berenguer 1994). Taking into account this picture of artefactual mobility and the hierarchical use of the space in the region, we will discuss in this paper the results obtained by Instrumental Neutron Activation  Analyses (INAA) for an archaeological ceramic sample as well as for a sample of clays, plus the results coming from the technological analysis, thus incorporating different kinds of data supporting the discussion at the regional level. The ceramic material comes from archaeological sites located at the Puna area of Chaschuil as well as from others sites at the Bolsón of Fiambalá, especially in different parts of the Abaucán valley (Palo Blanco, Ranchillos, Tatón, Batungasta, and Costa de Reyes), covering a temporal span of almost 800 radiocarbon years. Additionally, the clay samples are coming both from the Puna area, and from the different locations at the Abaucán valley.