The present report forms part of a general program of interdisciplinary research conducted by an thropologists of the Department of History and Archaeology, Universidad del Norte, Antofagasta (Chile), concerned with man's relationship to the desert environment from as far back as possible up to the present. Scattered across the desert landscape of northern Chile are a series of archaeological phenomena or ruins known as the abandoned nitrate oficinas (refineries, settlements, "towns"). Historians, private collectors of "treasure," and those in terested in the purchase and sale of scrap metal and used building materials in general have paid them a great amount of attention, but their potential value for study through archaeology has been neglected. The reasons for this might be, partly that these oficinas reflect the very recent past of our own culture, and partly the idea that problems pertain ing to the nitrate industry, and the people who were involved in the work, can best be studied on the basis of documentary sources. As a matter of fact, considerable formal history has been written dealing with different aspects of the rise, boom, and decline of the nitrate industry in northern Chile (for an extensive bibliography, see Bermudez 1963). In Chile, the practice of historical archaeology is still largely associated with the reconstruction and restoration of monuments, and efforts to attack the historical past by archaeological techniques similar to those used in prehistory have not been made until quite recently. Interest in the abandoned ni trate settlements was raised, partly because their ruins form an important part of the desert land scape, difficult to ignore by anybody interested in the archaeology of the historic past, and partly be cause the results of exploratory archaeological work together with a survey of published historical records suggested that archaeological research would supplement much of our knowledge gained from the history books on the people who lived there. Furthermore, it was expected that archaeolo gy would provide information not available in the written sources. Another incentive to initiate systematic investigations was the discovery that many former residents of the mining settlements are still alive, and that a great amount of unstudied archival material exists. The project has the multiple objectives of: 1) incoporating the abandoned mining settlements in to the archaeological records; 2) attempting to demonstrate that archaeology can effectively en large and enrich our knowledge of different aspects of life of the people who lived there, and 3) com bining the results of archaeological research with evidence obtained from historic records, ethnogra phy, interviews and correspondence with former residents. For purposes of comparison the authors also aim to conduct a "living archaeology" study in one of the only two nitrate settlements still functioning. As present interests are largely oriented toward the non-technologically-related aspects of be haviour, it has been preferred to use the term "his torical archaeology" rather than "industrial archaeology." The principal goals of this paper are: (1) first to present a summary of the preliminary results of a multi-stage project of investigation related to the abandoned nitrate oficinas situated in the II Region-Antofagasta (formerly Antofagasta prov ince), and (2) attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of archaeological techniques in conjunction with evidence from other disciplines as a means of recovering data pertinent to these settlements and their inhabitants.