Eric Dyrdahl

Of the variety of raw materials utilized by pre-Hispanic societies in Ecuador, mother-of-pearl (Pinctada mazatlanica and Pteria sterna) has not received much attention. The few existing studies have been undertaken on the coast and principally discuss how this raw material was used to fabricate fishhooks, with only a single example focused on adornments made from mother-of-pearl. This article presents the first detailed analysis of a collection of mother-of-pearl adornments recovered from the Ecuadorian sierra. Thanks to 276 m2 of excavations at the site of Las Orquídeas, more than 1,000 mother-of-pearl pieces have been documented that are related to an occupation dating to 800 - 400 cal BC. To study the use of mother-of-pearl at this site, this analysis adopts the chaîne opératoire perspective. The data presented demonstrate that raw material from the Pacific coast arrived on site in the form of complete valves. A comparison of the production waste and finished adornments suggests that only certain varieties of the mother-of-pearl adornments found were produced by the inhabitants of Las Orquídeas, with the rest probably being acquired via exchange.

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Daniela Grimberg, María José Figueroa, Benjamín Ballester y Valentina Varas

Sometimes, objects are designed in an apparently irrational way, however, they are merely the result of other rationalities different from our own. The case of the pre-Columbian wooden harpoons for marine hunting from the coast of Antofagasta provides an excellent example of this, because, although it was a key technology for their way of life, they designed it using materials almost entirely absent from the littoral, substantially increasing their production costs. We address this problem through a taxonomic and technological analysis of a sample of 38 wooden harpoon heads from sites dating from 6500 cal. BP to European contact. This will serve as input for discussing the strategies used in the procurement of forest resources and the logic of wood management in the coastal communities of Antofagasta. We propose that cultural, symbolic, political, and social factors predominated in the decision to use wood in the world’s most arid desert.

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Natalia Sentinelli, Leticia I. Gasparotti y Patricia S. Escola

Our research on the Miriguaca gorge (Antofagasta de la Sierra, Catamarca) aims to shed light on early agropastoral societies in this area of the Meridional Puna. We delve into the technological choices made in relation to the raw materials used to produce lithic instruments and ceramic pieces that we have found in Las Escondidas. The site may correspond to one or more semi-permanent occupations and, for this type of context, has one of the earliest recorded dates in the region within the first millennium AC. We consider the variability of inputs (rocks, clays, and sands) used in the production of these two artifactual assemblages, based on a qualitative-quantitative study, and we explore the potential availability of these resources at different scales. We register notable differences between the great variability of rocks used for the production of lithic instruments and the strong homogeneity observed in the ceramic raw materials, which allows us to suggest that the particular choices for each technology involved different dispositions of the technological habitus, places, and nearby and distant people. However, some recurrences indicate that, in certain cases, the circuits for obtaining raw materials experienced similar flows.

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Eduardo Moreno, Santiago Peralta González y Alberto Enrique Pérez

We present new data on the geochemical characterization, frequency and circulation of obsidian artifacts from the Sarmiento basin (Chubut, Argentine Patagonia). The study area is far and equidistant from known obsidian sources in southern and center-southern Patagonia. There is a low frequency of obsidian for all assemblages, coherent with expectations based on the frequency/distance to source ratio, and based on the structure of the lithic resources, which offers other good quality knapping raw materials close to the basin. The geochemical analysis indicated that the highest frequency occurs in the southern area, particularly of varieties from the Pampa del Asador (PDA), and a lesser frequency occurs in the central-south. Using the Geographic Information System (GIS), we estimated three types of distances between the basin and obsidian sources: Euclidian, optimal roads, and roads used in the 19th century according to ethnohistoric documents. In all cases, the closest source is Pampa del Asador in the southern sector. Nevertheless, the results indicate an overrepresentation of these obsidian artifacts in relation to distance. This suggests a more intense connection between the hunter-gatherers of the Sarmiento basin and the southern sector.

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