Benjamín Ballester

Prehistoric and historic networks on the Atacama Desert coast (northern Chile)

Comparing the records of fishing communities made in the sixteenth to twentieth centuries to the archaeological evidence of the sixth millennium BP, the authors propose a sophisticated prehistoric network for the coastal people of northern Chile. Residential seashore settlements link both along the coast to temporary production sites for fish, and inland to oasis-based providers of products from the uplands and salt flats. Sharing values and kinsfolk, the coastal communities must have travelled extensively in boats which, like their modern counterparts, made use of floats of inflated sealskin.

Mobility and Exchange among Marine Hunter-Gatherer and Agropastoralist Communities in the Formative Period Atacama Desert

Northern Chile’s Atacama Desert is one of the most unforgiving landscapes on the planet; however, a variety of complex risk-mitigation strategies facilitated long-term human occupation of the region. Using a burgeoning corpus of human, floral, and faunal stable carbon and nitrogen isotope data, the present work examines patterns of mobility, exchange, and social interaction in northern Chile’s Formative Period (1500 BC–AD 400). While the geographic barriers and harsh climatic conditions of the Atacama Desert, in concert with substantial logistic considerations, established constraints on human diet at the site and local levels, regional dietary variation speaks to frequent and possibly even regular interzonal movements of people and/or foodstuffs. Through isotopic analysis of the remains of 86 individuals, we examine regional patterns of dietary variation in light of recently advanced hypotheses concerning the nature of mobility, exchange, and social interaction in Formative Period northern Chile. These data indicate both systematic regional exchange in foods and other goods and the central role of sites in the Calama oases in facilitating this exchange and movement.

An Early Holocene task camp (~8.5 ka cal BP) on the coast of the semi-arid north of Chile

According to current thinking, the peopling of South America involved a coastal as well as an inland exploitation. Here the authors describe a camp that may denote a transition between the two. As indicated by bifacial tools, the investigation shows that people began to move inland and hunt mammals around 8500 cal BP, perhaps in association with a change in the climate.

Fuegian Firestone Quarry: Iron Pyrite on Capitán Aracena Island, Magallanes Archipelago, Southern Chile

Fire was essential for the ancient inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, at the southernmost end of the Americas. The Fuegians, as these human groups are traditionally known, produced fire primarily by striking a piece of iron pyrite against a flint nodule. Several European chroniclers mention this firestone technology and note its social value, a conclusion based on the fact that it was carefully safeguarded in leather pouches. Anglican missionary Thomas Bridges visited one of these pyrite sources in 1883 with two Yaghan guides and left behind a brief description of its out-of-the-way location. Almost 130 years later, we rediscovered this mine on Capitán Aracena Island in the Strait of Magellan. In this study, we present a brief report focused on the mine’s exact location, archaeological materials, and layout, and we offer the first physical-chemical description of the pyrite source. Comparison of these results to similar analyses of archaeological samples from the Santa Isabel Island settlements in the Magellan Strait suggests that the early inhabitants of the area used different pyrite sources, only one of them corresponding to the Capitán Aracena Island mine.