IBBEA   24401
INSTITUTO DE BIODIVERSIDAD Y BIOLOGIA EXPERIMENTAL Y APLICADA
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
New Holocene Paleoenvironmental Records from the Dry Puna, Northwestern Argentina
Autor/es:
MARCELO MORALES; PABLO TCHILINGUIRIAN; MALENA PIROLA; SABRINA BUSTOS
Lugar:
Tunuyán
Reunión:
Congreso; 4th Southern Deserts Conference; 2014
Resumen:
In this talk we present the ongoing analysis and the preliminary results of several new paleoenvironmental records that have been recovered in the past three years between 3200and 3800 masl on the Dry Puna of Jujuy Province, northwestern Argentina. At the 3rd Southern Deserts Conference in Kalahari, we presented several results on the paleoenvironmental conditions during the transitions between the Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene and between the Early and Mid- Holocene. We were particularly interested in understanding the links between the paleoecological scenarios and the characteristics, dating, and tempo of two processes: (1) the initial human dispersion in the Andes highlands of northwestern Argentina and (2) the peoplingof the entire area?including the high Andes above 4000 masl?by hunter-gatherer societies. In recent years, we have focused our research on the relationship between environmental conditions and several human processes that have occurred on the Argentine Puna during the past five to six thousand years, such as the rise in hunter-gatherers? complexity and inequality, the reduction of their residential mobility and changes in their settlement patterns, and the domestication of camelids and plants and food production. For this reason we have begun to sample and study several new sedimentary sequences and sediment cores with valuable multi-proxy paleoenvironmental information at different spatial scales and chronological resolution. Here we present some of the new results: dates, geomorphology, diatoms, and C content (TOC and TIC) in sediments-obtainedfrom several sequences currently being tudied in Barrancas (PCc2, Cruces Core 1, PBP, and PTI), and decadal resolution data (TOC and TIC) from Perfil Inca Cueva, both located on the Dry Puna. Based on the currently available paleoenvironmental information, we have started to study the impact of large scale climatic anomalies (for example ENSO and PDO), and of globally detected climatic changes such as MCA and LIA in particular localities of the studied area, in order to build accurate paleoecological models regarding resource structure characteristics?particularly its time-space abundance and predictability?during different periods of the Holocene. We believe that these models will improve the detail and reliability of our hypothesis to explain the nature and extent of the influence of the environment on various social processes on the Puna.