Lithic technical practices between Late Period's societies of Antofagasta de la Sierra (Province of Catamarca, Argentina)

ELIAS, ALEJANDRA M.

CABA

Simposio; 11th International Symposium on Knappable Materials From toolstone to stone tools; 2017

IMHICIHU-CONICET

Technology, including lithic technology, is a total social phenomenon, a set of practices carried out by subjects embedded in specific and historical, social, political, identitarian, economic and material relationships, which they negotiate, reproduce and transform in their daily tasks. These are instances of interaction where people assimilate knowledge of how things are made and used, while they reproduce and transform these culturally acquired skills.In this contribution, we approach the ways of making the artefacts among the inhabitants of different environmental sectors of Antofagasta de la Sierra (Southern Argentine Puna) after ca. 1100 BP. The variability in the selection of lithic raw materials and in the manufacture of projectile points allows us to propose a cultural landscape that varies from east to west. Those who inhabited the eastern intermediate sectors, with an important pastoral mobility, acceded to and used diversity of rocks, and practiced traditional ways of making lithic artefacts. Meanwhile, those in the basin bottom and western intermediate sectors, with increasing agricultural activity, used very scarcely the rocks of other environmental sectors and shared some ways of making artefacts almost unrecorded among the societies that inhabited Antofagasta de la Sierra before ca. 1100 BP.