HOUSEHOLD DYNAMICS AND THE REPRODUCTION OF EARLY VILLAGE SOCIETIES IN NORTHWEST ARGENTINA (200 BC-AD 850)

JULIÁN SALAZAR

Archaeology of Households, Kinship, and Social Change

Springer

Año: 2020;

Long term evolutionary narratives on South Andean pre-Columbian history have stressed lineal processes of complexity intensification, defined by big changes on subsistence strategies, from small and egalitarian hunter gatherer groups to complex multicommunitarian chiefdoms. Several social groupings, as households, villages, communities, and cultures, were assumed as functionally integrated systems, with motionless essences and seamless structures. In this contribution, household concept is revised from assemblage framework in order to understand how different entities are joint in dynamic fluxes, and to include materials as real actors of social relationships. I present new researches on Formative period settlements from the valleys and eastern slopes of North Western Argentina addressing the material dynamics of houses and the constitution of collectives which allowed the formation, growth, and dissolution of particular heterogeneous assemblages: early villages.