Bodies, settlements, and monuments: The architectural landscapes of the coast of the Atacama Desert (6500-1200 Cal BP)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The construction of the social landscape of the Atacama Desert coast (northern Chile) was a long and dynamic process in pre-Columbian times, involving different agencies and material strategies. Around 6500 calBP, these fisher-hunter-gatherers started building permanent settlements composed of clustered semi-subterranean enclosures, built with rock and mortar. These dwellings not only contained the living but also the dead, buried under sealed floors with plenty of goods, entering into quotidian relationships with the living. Nevertheless around 3000-2500 calBP, the old architecture disappears and a new spatial pattern emerges, signaling a different relationship between the living and the dead. The burials become monumental mounds, clearly separated from residential spaces. From this moment on, the tombs become aerial and visible, no longer hidden underground. These cemeteries form tumuli fields that can contain more than a hundred individual mounds. Conventionally, these transformations have been associated with the reduced residential mobility and the territorialization of the Formative period. This paper speculates about the political role of the dead in this construction process of the landscape and propose that their material changes may signal about the transformation of these communities in a context where place-making may have played a key role in the extended social networks.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50558