Environment, history and resilience of archaic coastal hunter-gatherer-fishers from the Atacama Desert, northern Chile

Summary

The coast of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile is one of the most extreme environments of the Andean area. However, the high productivity of the Pacific Ocean facilitated the peopling of this territory as early as 12.000 years cal BP and also a continual occupation of hunting-gathering-fishing communities throughout the Holocene. In this paper we discuss significant environmental changes during the Middle Holocene, as well as the systematic interaction of local communities with inland agropastoral groups during the Late Holocene. We are especially interested in exploring the resilience of local economy in the face of these important external conditions and transformations, making them one of the few cases in the coastal Andes where a hunter-gatherer-fisher economy was maintained until at least the 19th Century.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage