South America (Geographic Keyword)
526-550 (1,291 Records)
Prehistorically used in contexts ranging from mountain deity veneration to imperial conquest and warfare, hilltops serve as excellent platforms for staying connected to and informed of the surrounding social, political, and ritual landscape. This being said, how can the characteristics of visibility networks between hilltop sites help inform archaeologists of the ancient socio-political and ritual settings on which they were situated? Featuring dozens of hilltop sites that temporally correlate...
Historical Ecology and Archaeology on the Galápagos Islands (2015)
The poster introduces an interdisciplinary project recently initiated on San Cristóbal Island, the easternmost island of the Galápagos archipelago. Initially focusing on the 19th century plantation of Manuel J. Cobos, the project explores the nature and temporal depths of human involvement in ecological transformation, as novel or ‘emerging’ ecosystems, defined by their novelty, cultural origin, and subsequent endurance in the absence of humans, were developed within the context of what was to...
Historical ecology of landscape transformations and ceramic industries at the site of Cedro (Lower Tapajós) from pre-colonial to colonial times. (2016)
The presence of demographically dense indigenous societies in the Lower Tapajós River during AD 900-1600 is visible in the present day’s landscape through the existence of Amazonian Dark Earth (ADE), earthworks, and a distinctive ceramic industry. As demonstrated by recent archaeological surveys, landscape transformations and ceramic assemblages associated to the Tapajó chiefdom are widespread at the regional scale and attest to common cultural practices. Although these archaeological sites are...
Historical Ecology: Archaeology for a Sustainable Future (2016)
Historical Ecology is a research program that seeks to integrate diverse perspectives from human and natural sciences to improve our understanding on the relations between societies and their changing landscapes. Investigations in historical ecology draw from different corpus of data, including the participation of the public, not only to solve scientific problems, but also to provide answers to social and political situations. Archaeology has a major role in the production of knowledge on the...
Historical Gold Mining and Environmental Impact in the Ocoña Valley of Southern Peru (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental and Social Issues within Historical Archaeology (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Located at the heart of the ‘Nazca-Ocoña Gold Belt’, Corral Redondo represents one of the most enigmatic archaeological sites in southern Peru. While the site shot to fame after the well-publicized looting of spectacular prehispanic artifacts in the 1940’s, our recent archaeological project...
A History of Landscape Transformation and Environmental Change across the Ascope Irrigation System of the Chicama Valley. (2017)
The sequence of landscape transformation across the area of the Ascope Canal System in the Chicama Valley involved both natural and anthropogenic events and processes that unfolded in nonlinear ways. We argue that early events were crucial in determining transformations later in the sequence. In the arid environment of the North Coast, water availability plays a key role in landscape histories. This paper highlights evidence for El Niño events, water management, and changing ecologies for the...
Holocene Geology and Paleoenvironmental History of the lower Chicama River Valley and Coast (2017)
This paper focuses on reconstructing the Holocene paleoenvironmental history of the lower Chicama River valley and coastal system, which has provided diverse natural resources for the Preceramic cultures at Huaca Prieta and Paredones. The archaeological site of Huaca Prieta is situated on the southern tip of a Pleistocene terrace along the shore, ~3 km north of the Chicama River mouth and floodplain system. Paredones is located 0.6 km to the north on the eastern edge of the terrace. Here we...
Holocene Paleoclimate Reconstruction from δ18O Isotopes of Neocyclotus Opercula a Morphometric Analysis of Variation at the Archaic Site of San Jacinto1 Colombia (2015)
Neocyclotus snails produce opercula, a calcified plate attached to the foot of the gastropod serving as a protection mechanism from predators, and dehydration. Opercula are rarely found in the archaeological record, and have only been recovered from few archaeological contexts. Excavations at the Archaic site of San Jacinto, Colombia have facilitated the unprecedented recovery of 3,542 opercula a presence that has not been recorded previously in the neotropics. These calcified plates form...
The House that Built Me: local and non-local among the Lurin Yauyos during the Inka Empire (2017)
Most scholarship on the shifts in local lifeways during the Late Horizon strictly focused on changes in the availability to new and limited-access goods by local elites (D’Altroy 2001; Hastorf 1990; 2003). In these models, local leaders became immersed in reciprocal and status-granting relationships with the Inka through gifts and exclusive artifacts. Materiality played a pivotal role in the relationship between the Inka and their subjects. However, it is less clear how local ethnicity was...
Household dynamics and the reproduction of early village societies in Northwest Argentina (200BC-AD 350). (2017)
Long term evolutionary narratives on South Andean pre-Columbian history have stressed lineal processes of complexity intensification, defined by big changes on subsistence strategies, from small and egalitarian hunter gatherer groups to complex multicommunitarian chiefdoms. These changes were thought to influence or even determine the structure of household and consequently daily life of people. Nevertheless recent household archaeology studies have demonstrated that the reproduction of...
Household Practice and Early Forms of Social Inequality in Huaca Negra, Viru Valley (2016)
This research attempts to understand daily household practice in Huaca Negra, a coastal site that was occupied from 5,000 to 3,000 B.P. in the Viru Valley, to answer two interrelated research questions: (1) Were there signs of institutionalized social inequality represented at the household level in Huaca Negra during its occupation? (2) If so, through what kinds of daily household practices did potential leaders in this particular community differentiate themselves from others? Alternatively,...
Household Practice and Spatial Fashioning in the Chachapoya Community of Purunllacta de Soloco (2016)
For the Chachapoya of the eastern Andes, the household was a primary social space of production and community life. In order to examine the maintenance of such social spaces, this paper analyses the material continuity of household spatial production in the upper Amazonian community of Purunllacta de Soloco occupied between A.D. 400-1583. Many Chachapoya houses were continually inhabited and were refashioned according to a schema indicated by a particular material assemblage. I identify...
Households and Empire: A pXRF Study of Metal Artifacts from Cerro la Virgen (2016)
The Chimú Empire controlled much of the Peruvian North Coast during the Late Intermediate Period (1000-1476 AD), including the hinterland site of Cerro la Virgen (CLV). Previous research suggests that CLV could be viewed as a facet of the Chimú plan for the organization of rural areas, a plan that included controlled access to water, the restriction of rural settlement, and agricultural management through rural administrative centers. This model for local rule ultimately suggests that resources...
Houses of Colonial Chiefly Authority: Local Elites in the Social Order of Mawchu Llacta, a Colonial Reducción Town in the Southern Highlands of Peru (2017)
As a result of the Toledan Reforms in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the late fifteenth century, new settlements known as reducciones were established to centralize indigenous populations. Such is the case of Mawchu Llacta, originally Espinar de Tute, in the Caylloma Province, Arequipa. The introduction of these sweeping reforms brought a series of major changes to the social order. External agents were established as the new bearers of power and local elites took on a secondary status. However,...
Houses on the Hill: Preliminary Results of the Excavations at Casa Grande (PV57-42) in Chincha, Per (2016)
This poster presents the results of the preliminary excavation work done at sector A of the site Casa Grande (PV57-42) in the Chincha Valley, Peru. Initial field work focused on determining both the construction technique used to build these extensive terraces and identifying how these spaces were used by the mid-valley Chincha inhabitants. Excavation and preliminary laboratory processing focused on the ceramics and botanical remains recovered during the active field season, with further...
How did the end of the Cupisnique-Chavín Religious Complex affect local leadership? (2016)
In this paper I assess the impact of the end of the Cupisnique-Chavín Religious Complex (CCRC) in local leadership. Using the case of the Nepeña Middle Valley, I evaluate how authority was built during the Late Formative and how the disintegration of the CCRC around 500 B.C. had profound impacts in the way power was constituted and negotiated during the next centuries.
How many, how few, how long: pre-Columbian population density and human impact in pre-Columbian Amazonia (2017)
Assessing the landscape impact of past settlement and subsistence systems in space and in time is essential to reconstructing pre-Columbian land use in the Amazon basin. In this paper we consider archaeological and landscape evidence for past land use by examining the strengths and limitations of archaeological radiocarbon evidence as a proxy for broad demographic patterns in pre-Columbian Amazonia.
Human Biogeography in the Diamante Valley, (Central Western Argentina): Integrating Different Data in a New Research Design (2016)
The archaeology from the Diamante River Valley, located in Mendoza, Argentina, has been carried out since the beginning of the seventies. The information generated along these years was oriented in several study programs and was motivated by diverse research questions. Different kinds of surveys were done and very few data was published. Most of the archaeological information we have nowadays from this Valley comes from excavations using old techniques, some modern excavations and from...
Human Coprolite Diet Reconstruction Confirms Wetland Resource Use in the Coast of the Atacama Desert, 6580 cal. yr BP (2017)
It has been proposed that Chinchorro coastal people along the Atacama Desert in northern Chile had marginal access to plant food, a position refuted by recent scholars. The older perspective comes from bone chemistry analyses which showed a nearly exclusive reliance on marine animal resources. Newer analyses of mummy gut contents shows a substantial reliance on wetland plant resources, especially sedge rhizomes and seeds. Therefore, existing analyses present very different ideas of Chinchorro...
The Human Element in Industrialization: a Hypothetical Case Study of Ecuadorean Indians (1955)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Human ranking of spaces and the role of caches: case studies from the south of Patagonia (Argentina) (2016)
Storage of artifacts is a common behavior among hunter-gatherers. Archaeologically, caches have been identified in different places. In this paper, we focus on the discussion of the role of caches recovered in two different environments in southern Patagonia: the southern end of the Deseado Massif and the upper Santa Cruz river basin. In the first case, two caches, attributed to the colonization of this environment have been identified, while in the second case, the cache recovered would...
Human Response to Environmental Change during the Early/Mid Holocene in Central Western Argentina: Frame of Reference in Comparative Perspective (2016)
Early / Middle Holocene human strategies are an archaeological topic of debate in arid Central Western Argentina. Among the controversies are whether population decreased and what were human responses to increased aridity. In this presentation, we use Binford’s environmental frames of reference to model regional Early and Middle Holocene subsistence. Radiocarbon trends are used as paleodemography proxy, archaeofaunal, archaeobotanical, lithic assemblages and isotopes on human bone are used to...
Human Responses to Holocene Aridization South of the Atacama Desert (31° to 32° S), the Meaning of Differences in Landscape Use (2017)
The geographical band between 31°-32° S, from the Pacific to the Andes, lies in the southernmost part of the Semi-Arid North of Chile, south of the Atacama Desert. Multidisciplinary research to the north and south of the Choapa River’s mouth is uneven, thereby in need of new data for understanding the relative intensity of the human traces across the landscape and the human interactions with environmental changes. Currently, the combined pollen records in the coast and highlands indicate arid...
Human Selection on Maize Size Traits. A contribution from the archaeological record of Tarapacá, chile, South Central Andes. (2017)
Maize from Andean region has a recognized complex history, involving ecological and human interaction. Today, while Andean maize show high morphological and low genotypic diversities, the process involved in its production and selection is unclear. In this work we ask how the morphological and genetic diversity of maize has varied through Formative Period to present time in Tarapacá Region, northern Chile? To answer this we analysed thirty morphological traits and eight microsatellites markers...
Human Skeletal Remains from Highlands of Peru (1923)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.