Daily practices and the constitution of village landscapes in Northwest Argentina.

JULIÁN SALAZAR

Puebla

Conferencia; UNESCO HEADS Meeting: Origins of Agriculture and the Forager-Farmer Transition; 2014

UNESCO

Early village landscapes constituted new social contexts for human life. Sedentism, agro-pastoral labor, demographic growth and aggregation of people set up new ways of establishing, changing and managing social relationships. This new social, adaptive and ideological milieu was faced with the development of traditions of practices which were created and sustained through the repeated cycles of daily life and materialized in the archaeological record. The South Andean Formative (or ?Neolithic?) villager populations were characterized by a tension between the aggregation of communitarian collectives and the fragmentation of segmentary groups with some degree of autonomy, defined by productive and storage scale, residential settlements distribution and ceremonial public places. This presentation discusses comparative data on daily practices, household materiality and settlement patterns coming from Northwest Argentina addressing the problem of early village formation, growth and abandonment from the perspective of social actors engaged in this process. This historical approach, that takes into account the recursive relations between objective structures and practices, sheds light on the agents and social scales articulated in the process of village life expansion in the South Andes, but also contributes to understand the similarities and variations with other cases in a global scale.