Abstract
The European conquest of the New World produced major socio-environmental reorganization in the Americas, but for many specific regions and ecosystems, we still do not understand how these changes occurred within a broader temporal framework. In this paper, we reconstruct the long-term environmental and vegetation changes experienced by high-altitude wetlands of the southcentral Andes over the last two millennia. Pollen and charcoal analyses of a 5.5-m-long core recovered from the semi-arid puna of northern Chile indicate that while climatic drivers influenced vegetation turnaround, human land use and management strategies significantly affected long-term changes. Our results indicate that the puna vegetation mostly dominated by grasslands and some peatland taxa stabilized during the late Holocene, xerophytic shrubs expanded during extremely dry events, and peatland vegetation persisted in relation to landscape-scale management strategies by Andean pastoralist societies. Environmental changes produced during the post-conquest period included the introduction of exotic taxa, such as clovers, associated with the translocation of exotic herding animals (sheep, cattle, and donkeys) and a deterioration in the management of highland wetlands.
Highlights
The European conquest of the New World produced major transformations in the socio-environmental systems that evolved in the continent for several millennia [1,2]
Microcharcoal particles were categorized either as presence of stomata within epidermal cells and a flat surface, and we considered that they come from woody or herbaceous particles based on their morphology
The accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dates from the sediments provided a consistent chronology with an absence of anomalous dates (Table 1)
Summary
The European conquest of the New World produced major transformations in the socio-environmental systems that evolved in the continent for several millennia [1,2]. Some of the socio-ecological effects that this event produced include demographic collapse, reorganization of the socio-political systems, disruption of previous resource management practices, biodiversity loss, and the translocation of new species of animals and plants [3,4]. Paleo-ecological reconstructions have shown an intensification of land use following European settlements in some regions. In the Andes, we know much about the significant demographic and socio-political changes that the European conquest produced [9,10], only a few studies have addressed the resulting ecological effects. We address the problem of how Andean vegetation responded to the interaction between land-use intensification and extreme climatic events before and after the European conquest. Using data from a pollen record and informed by the archaeological and paleo-ecological records of the area, we evaluated the various transformations that vegetation underwent in the south central Andean of northern Chile and neighboring areas of southern Peru and western Bolivia in the south central Andes
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