CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The links between environmental characteristics and climatic change with human subsistence have been the subject matter of research and publications during decades in anthropology and archaeology. This relation was usually studied in a coarse grain in terms of their spatial and temporal resolution in both, extractive and productive societies. The improvement in the resolution of the paleoenvironmental information in the past two decades, and the better understanding of the relationship between climatic signals of different scope allowed the refinement of the questions that currently can be made, and the models which can be built about this topic. In the recent years a new high resolution paleoenvironmental records have been studied in the South-Central Andes, and in Northwestern Argentina as well. This records provided rich and detailed data abouth the main trends in climate, and their impact in the environment during the past 2000 years. Laguna Pululos 1012 core, is the only of this records which is located in the Puna or Altiplano of the Jujuy Province, Argentina. It is the more representative source of paleoenvironmental information for the region in order to test some hypothesis regarding particular subsistence strategies carried out by pastoralist societies that inhabited both the Puna and Quebrada de Humahuaca during the past 1400 years. In this presentation we compare the mentioned paleoenvironmental information with the archaeozoological record from 13 archaeological sites , in order to explore and discuss two particular aspects abouth the relatioship between climate and subsistence in llama herder´s societies: a) the links between sustained draught periods and the strategies of herd conservation through differential culling, and b) the relationship between climatic uncertainty and the frequency (i.e. abundancy) of the hunting practices on wild camelids.