Dynamic places, durable structures: Early Formative Agro-Pastoral settlements, South Andes, Argentina

JULIÁN SALAZAR; IAN KUIJT

ANTIQUITY

Cambridge University Press

Año: 2016 vol. 90 p. 1576 - 1593

0003-598X

The Foraging-Farming transition is often envisioned as an evolutionary development characterized by the development of domesticated plants and animals in environmentally productive areas of the world, the use of water for irrigation, and the settling down of people in one place to protect and manage plant and animal resources. Embodied in this characterization is the assumption that with the shift to agropastoralism human communities invested more labour in the construction of residential buildings, constructed these buildings in relatively tight spatial clusters, relied upon a greater use of food storage to overcome lean years and periods of starvation, and eventually developed pottery and other technologies.New archaeological research in the valleys and highlands basins of Northwest Argentina provide new insight into the Holocene human expansion into high altitude environments, the successful entrenchment of agropastoralist communities in these zones, and provides insight into the lifeways of Formative agricultural-herders communities over two thousand years ago (Albeck 2000; Haber 2006; Korstanje 2005; Olivera 1991; Olivera et al. 2012; Scattolin 2006; Tarragó 1999). Previous interpretations of the Argentinian Formative archaeological record have provided only limited consideration of the dynamic and complex social and economic processes leading to the appearance of Formative communities in these areas. Interestingly in some contexts, we find evidence for the organization of temporary occupations, with a limited number of people, focused on the seasonal exploitation of marginal environments, and the construction of significant stone buildings and features. In several south Andean cases, residential sites are spread out along the landscape with considerable distances between houses and fields, and are characterized by the absence of large, clustered village settlements.