Abstract

The first human societies to establish their settlements in the Atacama Desert ~13,000 years ago learned how to handle extreme hyper-arid conditions that would have challenged many societal groups and caused their collapse. Fragments of this history are currently being recovered through the collaboration of researchers from different disciplines and institutions in Chile and other countries. Social factors that may explain how societies succeeded in overcoming the challenges of environmental conditions in the Atacama Desert and subsequent climate fluctuations through time are highlighted in this presentation. We show how prehistoric people modified their cultural systems to survive under some of the most extreme conditions. The presentation will focus on the earliest occupations that took place at the end of the Pleistocene, when the Central Andes Pluvial Event II provoked an expansion of available wetlands and riparian woodlands toward the core of the Atacama Desert, allowing hunter-gatherers to create the first socio-natural landscapes. A second and more visible archaeological socio-natural landscape occurred ∼3000–2500 BP, coincident with another period with increasing water availaibility. In this case, people took advantage of this bonanza by “domesticating” the Desert with large investment in farming land, canals, and agglutinated domestic structures along with ceremonial constructions. Finally, during the last ∼1500 years, local people developed a more dynamic or expeditious socio-natural landscape. “Modern” society has relied on high technological investment to artificially create localized industrial landscapes.