CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

We study a sample of rodents coming from the archaeological site TebenquicheChico, situated on the Antofagasta de la Sierra Department, Catamarca Province, near to theAntofalla salt-flat at 520 m elevation. The site is a small settlement inhabited between the IVand XII centuries and repopulated in the XVII century. The remains were recovered from the buildings of the archaeological site, near a small vega, old irrigation canals, and agriculturalfields. We report the following taxa: Abrothrix andinus, Phyllotis xanthopygus, Phyllotis sp.,Neotomys ebriosus, Chinchilla chinchilla, Lagidium sp., Ctenomys sp. y Abrocoma cinerea.Several craniodental characters that differentiate Chinchilla from Lagidium on the basis of fragmentary remains are described in detail, two taxa widely used as a basic resource in the economy of human populations in the Central Andes. Excepting Neotomys ebriosus, all the species of the archaeological site live in this area of the argentine Puna. The record of this species is noteworthy because their modern populations have been only documented in the more humid eastern mountain ranges of the region. The temporal amplitude, the exiguity of the archaeologicalsample, the absence of comparable modern samples, as well as the anthropogenic transformationof the local landscape prevent the reconstruction of paleoenvironmental conditions basedon the Tebenquiche Chico rodents.