Abstract
The abundance of the southern Pacific mollusk loco (Concholepas concholepas), among other conspicuous marine supplies, are often cited as critical resources behind the long-term cultural and demographic fluctuations of prehistoric hunter-gatherers at the coastal Atacama Desert. These societies inhabited one of the world’s most productive marine environments flanked by one the world’s driest deserts. Both of these environments have witnessed significant ecological variation since people first colonized them at the end of the Pleistocene (c. 13,000 cal yr BP). Here, we examine the relationship between the relative abundance of shellfish (a staple resource) along a 9,500-year sequence of archaeological shell midden accumulations at Caleta (a small inlet or cove) Vitor, with past demographic trends (established via summed probability distributions of radiocarbon ages) and technological innovations together with paleoceanographic data on past primary productivity. We find that shellfish extraction varied considerably from one cultural period to the next in terms of the number of species and their abundance, with diversity increasing during periods of regionally decreased productivity. Such shifts in consumption patterns are considered community based management decisions, and for the most part they were synchronous with large and unusual regional demographic fluctuations experienced by prehistoric coastal societies in northern Chile. When taken together with their technological innovations, our data illustrates how these human groups tailored their socio-cultural patterns to what were often abrupt and prolonged environmental changes throughout the Holocene.
Highlights
Sixteenth century written impressions of Spaniard conquerors state that the inhabitant of the coast of northern Chile’s Atacama Desert were “barbarians,” “brutes,” or “retrograde” (Lozano Machuca, 1965[1581])
This agrees with analyses using stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes of human bones from Caleta Vitor and other coastal areas which have revealed a longterm pattern of food consumption based primarily on marine resources compared with terrestrial inputs, despite local environmental fluctuations and socio-cultural changes among inland groups that evolved into Formative (Neolithic) societies, with farming and pastoralism as key socio-economic factors
Along the Pacific coast of northern Chile, as elsewhere, our study shows that the peoples at Caleta Vitor subsisted on a rather narrow selection of a wide array of available marine and littoral species, which included a mixture of gastropods, bivalves, crustaceans, fish, sea birds, and sea mammals
Summary
Sixteenth century written impressions of Spaniard conquerors state that the inhabitant of the coast of northern Chile’s Atacama Desert were “barbarians,” “brutes,” or “retrograde” (Lozano Machuca, 1965[1581]). Cultural biases aside, written records describe the ingenious procedures used to make rafts from sea lion skins, crafts which persisted for centuries attracting comments from eighteenth-century naturalists (Frézier, 1713) Since these societal groups depended almost exclusively on coastal marine resources, these “rafts” can be viewed as part of a complex technological system, and were used until the nineteenth century in several northern Chilean ports for fishing, the transportation of goods and passengers, and to load saltpeter onto transoceanic clipper ships (Núñez, 1986a; Paez, 1986; Horta, 2015). The evidence for such hypotheses of resilience or stability has yet to be evaluated in a systematic way, starting with the examination of the shell midden domestic remains often cited to back such claims
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