Assessing Impacts of Late Holocene Environmental Variability on the Demography of Prehispanic Societies in Northern Chile (18°-29°S)
Author(s): Eugenia Gayo; Calogero Santoro; Claudio Latorre; Virginia Mcrostie; Jose M. Capriles
Year: 2018
Summary
Agricultural communities began to spread over much of the Atacama Desert (18°-29°S) at 3.5 ka BP, triggering unprecedented levels of population growth. In inland areas and particularly along desert oases, this phenomenon featured increasing complexity in food-production systems and sedentary lifestyles with population aggregating in architecturally complex villages. Whereas, littoral populations maintained marine foraging and fishing strategies with limited inland food-resources. Both lifestyles persisted up to the European conquest, which came on the heels of significant population decline throughout the entire continent. Here, we bring together paleoecological, archaeological and paleodemographic evidence to explicitly explore the role of past ENSO-induced climate changes in determining spatial convergences/divergences in demographic trajectories, temporal continuities/discontinuities in resource exploitation (i.e subsistence-strategy), and technological/cultural innovations of Atacama Prehispanic populations. Results show that over the previous three millennia these societies underwent important centennial-scale demographic fluctuations. As agrarian and foraging strategies are highly sensitive to water availability and ecosystem productivity in this arid bioclimate, both coastal and inland groups experienced boom-bust cycles. Changes observed during the last 3.5 ka BP correlate with variations in the activity/intensity of ENSO, a major driver for modern bioproductivity and variations in hydroclimate. Acknowledgments: FONDAP #1511009, CAPES FB-0002-2014, Anillo SOC1405, PCI PII20150081, PFB-23 (IEB).
Cite this Record
Assessing Impacts of Late Holocene Environmental Variability on the Demography of Prehispanic Societies in Northern Chile (18°-29°S). Eugenia Gayo, Calogero Santoro, Claudio Latorre, Virginia Mcrostie, Jose M. Capriles. Presented at The 82nd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC. 2018 ( tDAR id: 444647)
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Keywords
Geographic Keywords
South America: Andes
Spatial Coverage
min long: -82.441; min lat: -56.17 ; max long: -64.863; max lat: 16.636 ;
Record Identifiers
Abstract Id(s): 20998