Durante décadas los arqueólogos pensaron que los primeros americanos eran habilidosos cazadores y fabricantes de herramientas sofisticadas que habían arribado desde el noreste de Asia hace 11.200 años. El notable hallazgo de Monte Verde, sitio arqueológico ubicado en Puerto Montt, en el sur de Chile, cambió radicalmente esta teoría. El arqueólogo Tom D. Dillehay y su equipo internacional multidisciplinario, integrado por científicos de la Universidad Austral de Chile, trabajaron en el siti...

This volume provides an up-to-date and in-depth summary and analysis of the political practices of pre-Columbian communities of the Araucanians or Mapuche of south-central Chile and adjacent regions. This synthesis draws upon the empirical record documented in original research, as well as a critical examination of previous studies. By applying both archaeological and ethnohistorical approaches, the latter including ethnography, this volume distinguishes itself from many other studies that...

This handbook gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists to compile the latest thinking about archaeological theory. The authors provide a comprehensive picture of the theoretical foundations by which archaeologists contextualize and analyze their archaeological data. Student readers will also gain a sense of the immense power that theory has for building interpretations of the past, while recognizing the wonderful archaeological traditions that created it. An ext...

Esta historia retrata la constancia de una relación intensa, a veces conflictiva y a ratos amable, entre unos hombres que se lanzaron a la conquista de un territorio y otros que no se dejaron dominar. No pudiéndose aniquilar, los primeros se tuvieron que resignar con hacer ver que seguían mandando, y los segundos se conformaron con demostrar que seguían siendo libres. Unos y otros se mintieron a sabiendas de que lo hacían; dejando en manos de intermediarios la faena de administrar ese male...

La expansión de la producción de cultivos y otras tecnologías, los proyectos laborales basados en el parentesco, la construcción de montículos y el incremento demográ co formaron condiciones siempre cambiantes en los Andes. Por ello, el presente libro propone un nuevo y más complejo modelo para entender la transición de la caza y la recolección al cultivo, argumentando que tales desarrollos evolucionaron regionalmente, fueron fluidos y desiguales y estuvieron sujetos a reversión. Así, la o...

The Cultural Foundations of Early South American Societies examines the remarkable transformation of the Central Andes and the tropical Amazon beginning around 7000 BCE, when the Indigenous inhabitants began to develop food production, permanent settlements, monumental architecture, and complex social organizations. Moving beyond traditional chronological categories of “Archaic” and “Formative,” the fourteen essays in this volume reveal how early South American societies followed ...

Huaca Prieta—one the world’s best-known, yet least understood, early maritime mound sites—and other Preceramic sites on the north coast of Peru bear witness to the beginnings of civilization in the Americas. Across more than fourteen millennia of human occupation, the coalescence of maritime, agricultural, and pastoral economies in the north coast settlements set in motion long-term biological and cultural transformations that led to increased social complexity and food production, and lat...

Archeologists have always considered the beginnings of Andean civilization from c.13,000 to 6,000 years ago to be important in terms of the appearance of domesticated plants and animals, social differentiation, and a sedentary lifestyle, but there is more to this period than just these developments. During this period, the spread of crop production and other technologies, kinship-based labor projects, mound-building, and population aggregation formed ever-changing conditions across the And...

Anthropological histories and historical geographies of colonialism both have examined the material and discursive processes of colonization and have identified the opportunities for different kinds of relationships to emerge between Europeans and the indigenous people they encountered and in different ways colonized. These studies have revealed complex, differentiated, colonializing and colonialized identities, shifting and ambiguous political relations, social pluralities, and mutating a...