House Chronology at Yutopian, Province of Catamarca, Northwest Argentina

GERO, JOAN M.; SCATTOLIN, MARÍA CRISTINA

Amherst, Massachusetts

Conferencia; Northeast Conference on Andean Archaeology and Ethnohistory; 1999

Northeast Conference on Andean Archaeology and Ethnohistory

TheValles Calchaquis in the northwest provinces of Catamarca and Salta, Argentina, are regionally well known for their dry, sunny climate, their dramatically sculpted and brightly colored sandstone landscapes, and their late prehistoric settlements with impressive funerary urns pertaining to the Regional Development period. Sites such as Quilmes, Fuerte Quemado and Cerro Pintado, and the famous accompanying Santa Mariana ceramics, occupy a central place in northwest Argentinean prehistory and document the arrangement of fortified chiefdoms in place during the 14th and 15th centuries that were ultimately conquered by the Incas. Much less attention, however, has been paid to the earlier occupations of this high, dry region where roads are scarce and architecture non-monumental. Since 1993, we have jointly directed the Proyecto Cajón, focused in the Valle del Cajón, a box-shaped side-valley of the Calchaqui system, investigating Early Formative society (roughly 600 BC to 1000 AD). This first fully agricultural period in the Argentinean sequence is held to be composed of dispersed, replicative, autonomous and egalitarian single or clustered domestic units, spread thinly over the landscape much as we still see them today in the Cajón. At the same time, the Early Formative is associated with elaborated craft goods like Condorhuasi and Vaquerías polychrome ceramics, Candelaria modeled and Cienega geometric pottery, copper and gold ornaments, bronze bracelets and bells, and necklaces of hard stone and shell. Little change is theorized for the Early Formative although ceramic sequencing has been proposed for distinct valley systems within this period. Our project began by questioning why, and how, the circulation of special goods such as elaborated pottery and technologically sophisticated metal products articulated with a dispersed model of life in the Formative that was held to be essentially social symmetrical or with low levels of social hierarchy (Ottonello y Lorandi 1987:67 y ss., Olivera 1988:87, Raffino 1991:4, 75, Scattolin 1990, Tarragó 1993). To our surprise, we have ended up finding quite a different pattern of Early Formative settlement in the Cajón at the nucleated village of Yutopian made up of some 10 more-or-less-distinct residential patio groups, in some cases with remarkable preservation and integrity and apparently rapidly abandoned, with discernable trajectories of change evident through the Early Formative. After three field seasons at Yutopian, we are ready to reconsider the basic precepts of the Early Formative from the perspective of this site. We begin here with an overview, first of the region and previous archaeological research conducted here; we then turn to Yutopian and review the excavated sectors and structures, consider the chronology of occupation, and conclude with some lessons about change during the Argentinean Early Formative period.