Abstract

Pre-Hispanic and historical roads in the southern central Andes constitute a complex network that socially and economically articulates the highlands with the valleys that lead to the Pacific Ocean. In the case of the present study, we analyse some pre-Hispanic routes in the light of archaeological records of roads and settlements from the Late Period, as well as ethnohistorical and ethnographic studies of contemporary trans-Andean social and cultural displacements and exchanges. From an ethnoarchaeological perspective that emphasises memory processes, we suggest that these paths and roads favoured the preservation of practices of economic, social and cultural displacement and exchange between the highlands, the foothills and the coast. Therefore, we understand this walking as knowledge of a “long memory” related to the transformations and persistence of an inter-ecological mobility that links the Carangas altiplano with the coastal valleys and the port of Arica.