Sociocultural Trends and Innovations along 13,000 Years of Plant Use in the Atacama Desert, Chile

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Histories of Human-Nature Interactions: Use, Management, and Consumption of Plants in Extreme Environments" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the Atacama Desert, plant resources are scarce and unevenly distributed due to water availability. However, by compiling all the available archaeobotanical evidences since the late Pleistocene (ca. 13,000 BP) until the Inka epoch (ca. 450 BP) in a single database, we demonstrate that populations ranging from mobile hunter-gatherer bands to sedentary people relying on agriculture managed plants from coastal, highland, and tropical forest ecosystems. Furthermore, we show that people established routes of interaction to acquire plant resources from very long-distance locations (>600 km). We also demonstrate that by the Formative period (>3,000–1,500 cal years BP), the introduction of a wide range of farming crops, water control techniques, and cultivation of diverse plants not only ended the chronic shortage of plants characteristic of a hyperarid environment, but marked the establishment of a set of staple foods for the Atacama Desert dwellers. Later, under the rule of centralized societies such as the Inka, people mostly intensified the cultivation of maize. By contrasting the trends of plant utilization along this cultural sequence with sociocultural changes and paleodemographic and climatic fluctuations, we note that the “green revolution” of the Formative coincides with an exponential increase in the number of people inhabiting the Atacama.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Histories of Human-Nature Interactions: Use, Management, and Consumption of Plants in Extreme Environments   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 30907