Exploring Remote Sensing for Lithic Source Geolocation in the Southern Atacama Desert, Chile

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Starkly juxtaposed resource distribution presented a notable challenge to the prehistoric inhabitants of the southern Atacama Desert. While the Pacific coast yielded a reliable abundance of food resources and materials (shell, bone, animal hide) for subsistence and certain types of manufacture, other raw materials had to be sought from discrete locales within the vast expanse of the inhospitable inner Desert. In the case of high-quality lithic raw material, suitable sources could lay dozens, if not hundreds, of kilometers from coastal settlements, obliging long-distance travel for procurement and/or involvement in systems of exchange. The present work details preliminary attempts to apply satellite-based remote sensing techniques, developed and applied by Borie and colleagues in other regions of the Atacama to a study region at the southern end of the world’s driest desert. Our hope was that the use of multispectral LANDSAT imagery would reveal the locations of sources of high quality silicious raw material in our study area. While successful in some regards, due to differences in regional geology and the inability of the remote sensing approach employed to differentiate between minerals/rocks with similar spectral characteristics, the results obtained were contingent, obliging further refinement to the techniques employed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 54035