LATE QUATERNARY PALEOENVIRONMENTS, SOUTH ANDEAN PUNA (25º-27ºS), ARGENTINA.

PABLO TCHILINGURIAN; OLIVERA, DANIEL

Hunter-gatherers from a High-Elevation Desert: People of the Salt Puna (Northwest Argentina)

British Archaeological Reports (BAR)

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2014; p. 43 - 69

The Southern Puna is a morphostructural region that belongs to the Andean Cordillera. It covers 2,000,000 km2, and extends from 24º to 27º S and 66.5º to 68º W. It is characterized by extreme aridity (Santoro and Núñez 1987) with dry conditions (120 mm/yr), and ten year cycles of extreme drought (<10 mm) interrupted by years of abundant rain (200-300 mm). This makes it impossible to predict the conditions from one year to the next. These year-decennial scale situations, of course, are extremely difficult to detect in the geological record of this desert but they are crucial to the economy of human groups. In this kind of environment, risky and uncertain conditions have to be considered in order to analyze economic strategies of these human groups. The aim of this chapter is to study the paleoenvironmental evolution in the Southern Puna during the Late Pleistocene and early-middle Holocene in particular, the changes between aridity and humidity, and to link this evolution to human occupation.