Microfossils as narrators and protagonists in the stories of agricultural landscapes

MALOBERTI, MARIANA; CUENYA, PATRICIA; ZAPATIEL, JULIETA; KORSTANJE, MARÍA ALEJANDRA; TADDEI SALINAS, LAURA

Aix en Provence

Encuentro; 10th International Meeting of Phytolith Research; 2016

Through the agro archaeological studies carried in the El Bolsón valley (Catamarca, Argentina), we have identified not only different modalities of productive spaces, but also different agricultural practices that gave rise to a specific history to the place.We have carried multiple microfossils extractions from sediments sampled in agricultural structures, as an avenue through which interpret the special relationship through which farmers have involved themselves with plants under cultivation. While these studies allow us to interpret these relationships in located contexts or restricted to the site itself, the integration of information allows us to think about the different ways in which farming practices coexisted and also in its changes and continuities over time.In this paper we present a comparison of two nearby areas (El Alto El Bolsón and Yerba Buena) which, from the archaeological point of view, were separated as two sites since they settle in different geomorphologic scenarios, and present different architectural and artefactual features in surface. These supposedly indicated a technical and perhaps chronological differentiation, but the advancement of research has allowed us to review this idea, so both sites have participated of the same historical process.Now we compare both sites over land use and agricultural practices. For that purpose we choose the study of microfossils in sediments, which allow us to understand farming practices in the long term. In this sense, the approach is contextual and not nominal. This implies that it is not the identification of a given taxa from phytoliths or starches (in the case of plants) or diatoms in particular, what allows us to interpret changes and continuities in farmers landscapes conformation, but rather the relationships, links and causalities that form the structure of land use itself. So, this study shows continuity in the variability of agricultural practices rather than a correspondence with different times of occupation. By the time the comprehensive and integrated evidence makes us think that the variability in agricultural practice was not exclusive to one or the other site, but rather appears in both, excluding then the chronological factor from the equation.This contextual approach, together with the methodology of multiple extraction of microfossils used by the team, allow us to visualize in a more complex, in the original sense of the word "landscape" to what otherwise would be only profiles, levels, samples and microfossils.