La cerámica de los túmulos funerarios de la costa árida del Desierto de Atacama, Chile. Química, circulación e intercambio entre interior y costa

Summary

Beginning from 2500 years BP, coastal inhabitants of Antofagasta region began involved in the general Formative process of northern Chile. Despite their subsistence strategies remained based on hunting, fishing and collecting marine resources, some aspects of their material culture show notorious changes, as it happens with the developing of burial mound cemeteries. The offerings recorded at the graves suggest exchange intensification with other social groups. Significantly, between these offerings, we recovered ceramic vessels and fragments not previously known for this coastal population.

Recent neutron activation analyses carried on 68 ceramic fragments and six clay samples obtained from the coastal mounds and from other funerary and domestic contexts at inland sites from Antofagasta and Tarapacá regions, together with traditional ceramic analyses permits us to evaluate with whom the coastal products/ceramic vessels exchange was articulated during the period. Also, these analyses provide the identification of the main distribution circuits, some of them to great distances. Furthermore, with these results we are able to discuss which ceramic types were preferred by the coastal inhabitants and to what uses this new technology was put to.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Ceramics of the Indigenous Peoples of South America: Studies of Production and Exchange using INAA

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