Скачать или смотреть Catastrophic events and cultural change in Holocene hunter-gatherers from the hyperarid Atacama

The southern Atacama coast in what is today northern Chile presents a hyperarid climate with limited water resources and very low terrestrial productivity. This extreme environment was inhabited by hunting and gathering populations for over 12.000 years until the late 19th Century. Even though continuities in technologies and lifeways of these populations have been usually stressed by archaeologists, a closer look at the archaeological record shows important changes occuring at specific moments, especially in settlement patterns and mobility. Maybe the most dramatic shift occured around 4000 cal BP, when semisedentary agglomerated comunities went back to systems of low demography and high residential mobility, modifying their settlement system and burial patterns without showing changes in technology or subsistence. In this paper we explore this sudden process of transition, and correlate it with the occurrence of catastrophic events of wide spatial scale in the coastal Atacama desert, namely a major tsunamigenic megaeartquake.

Author: salazar, diego - Universidad de Chile (Presenting author)
Co-Author: vargas, gabriel - universidad de chile; guendon, jean louis - cnrs; goff, james - university of new south wales