Abstract

The integration of archaeological and palaeoclimate records has major implications for understanding feedbacks between environmental change and human behaviour, societal collapse or resilience. Here, we evaluate modes and spatial-temporal variations in demographic responses of Prehispanic societies from the western Andean slope (16°-25°S) to changing palaeoenvironmental settings over the last 14,000 years. Population patterns were inferred by examining the distribution of >1,960 radiocarbon dates from archaeological sites located across an aridity gradient encompassing from the hyperarid coastal Atacama Desert to the semi-arid Altiplano. So, this perspective makes possible to fairly compare longterm demographic dynamics among populations that differ either in cultural or ecological backgrounds. We verified significant variations in demographic patterns at sub-continental and regional scales throughout the latest Quaternary, which suggest cyclic changes in past population levels soon after the early peopling of South America. Expect for coastal populations, these demographic changes occurred at the same times as major shifts in hydroclimate conditions recorded in the area. Actually, population expansions (crushes) are practically synchronous to positive (negative) anomalies in water availability. Our findings emphasize the susceptibility of Prehispanic societies-particularly for continental populations- to centennial and millennial paleoenvironmental fluctuations at different paleoclimate scenarios and subsistence economies (i.e hunter-gatherers or farming groups). Hence, these kinds of reconstructions have the potential to provide a consolidated cultural-environmental context from which is possible to discuss the vulnerability of future societies from arid regions to projected alterations in the large-scale hydrological cycle.