Circa 12,000-Year-Old Fiber Technologies in the Atacama Desert

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Plants have been used for making fabrics for thousands of years (Hardy 2007; Hardy et al. 2020; Hurcombe 2008; Kvavadze et al. 2009, Nadel et al. 1994), and many species have been gathered and eventually cultivated for this purpose (Barber 1992; Gleba and Harris 2019; Rast-Eicher et al. 2021). Evidence of bast fiber artifacts suggests that the development of these sophisticated technologies was critical to different dimensions of past lifestyles. In this paper I present the oldest evidence of plant technologies from two open-air Pleistocene sites: Quebrada Mani 32 (12,240–11,465 cal yr BP) and Pampa Ramaditas 5 (12,140–12,225 cal yr BP) located in the Quebrada Mani drainage in the Pampa del Tamarugal, northern Chile. Through archaeobotanical and structural analysis, bast fibers of Cyperaceae and Apocynaceae family plants have been found being worked into spliced threads representing early plant fiber technologies in the south-central Andes region. These organic technologies offer an opportunity for a yet unexplored research avenue regarding early weaving technologies and the use of plants among Pleistocene hunter-gatherer groups in South America. Finally, we suggest that perishables industries played a critical role in the adaptive strategies of the late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers of the Atacama Desert.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39152.0