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Introduction
Current institution
Additional affiliations
June 2016 - present
Institute for Field Research
Position
- Managing Director
Description
- I am the director of Uspallata field school in Argentina, which is run through Institute for Field Research. Scholarships are available. http://ifrglobal.org/program/argentina-uspallata/
April 2014 - present
Publications
Publications (80)
In the fourth millennium BP, there were major environmental and cultural changes on the Andean altiplano of South America, but the chronology remains vague. A recent synthesis describes a slow, gradual transition from hunting and gathering to agropastoralism. This proposal is tested by refining the date of the onset of more humid and stable conditi...
Khonkho Wankane is a ceremonial center located in the southern Lake Titicaca Basin, Bolivia. During the Late Formative period (AD 1–500), its residents practiced agropastoral lifeways and participated in the rise of the state at Tiwanaku. Like at many Andean sites, bones from the family Camelidae are the most abundant large mammal in domestic conte...
The development of sociopolitical complexity at Tiwanaku around AD 500 was one of the major episodes of social change in the history of the Lake Titicaca Basin. It was the result of poorly understood processes that took place at a series of ceremonial centers in the preceding centuries. The history of Tiwanaku during this time is especially unclear...
Human-environment interactions are a focus of interdisciplinary research in the high Andes, recently invigorated by sediment-core data from Lake Junín (Chinchaycocha). On the basis of these records, recent articles have argued that humans arrived in the Junín basin 13 thousand calibrated years ago (kya), set large-scale fires, and hunted Pleistocen...
The excavation of a stratified sequence of deposits spanning the Initial Late Formative period (250 BC– AD 120 ) at Iruhito, in the upper Desaguadero Valley of Bolivia, provides insight into this previously unrecognized, four-century period separating the well-documented Middle Formative (800–250 BC) from the Late Formative (~ AD 120–590 ) period....
The Moche archaeological culture flourished along Peru’s North Coast between the 4th and 10th centuries CE and was characterized by a complex social hierarchy dominated by political and religious elites. Previous archaeological evidence suggests kinship was a key factor in maintaining political authority within Moche society. To test this hypothesi...
This integrated pedo-geoarchaeological study focuses on three abandoned pre-Hispanic terrace agricultural systems near Laramate in the southern Andes of Peru (14.5° S), aiming to unravel the pedological and land-use history of the region, which served as a significant agricultural hub during pre-Hispanic times. The key objectives of the investigati...
We report a tephra deposit in the southern Lake Titicaca Basin, Bolivia, which was deposited by a major, previously unrecognized eruption sometime between AD 400 and 720. Archaeological data suggest these centuries were characterized by a substantial community migration to Tiwanaku, where social interaction networks gave birth to one of the Andes’...
This integrated pedo-geoarchaeological study focuses on three abandoned prehispanic terrace agricultural systems near Laramate in the southern Andes of Peru, aiming to unravel the pedological and land-use history of the region. The investigation involved contextualizing the former agricultural management system within its paleoecological framework...
An impressive relic of the scale of human-environment interaction and land modification in prehispanic South America are agricultural terraces, covering slopes across the Andes and of which only a fraction is still in use nowadays. Despite the ubiquity of agricultural terraces in the Andes, there is a lack of systematic studies that combine the inv...
This paper presents an integrative and interdisciplinary approach to the study of ancient agricultural terraces and food production systems. Our approach consists of (1) a resource dependency theoretical framework and (2) the application of a variety of archaeological and geoscientific methods, including archaeological and geomorphological surveys,...
Este trabajo presenta la hipótesis de que la migración tuvo un rol central en la historia del sitio Cerro Calvario en el valle de Calingasta, San Juan, Argentina. A pesar de su importancia regional, hay poca información publicada sobre este sitio. Según un modelo cronológico bayesiano que cuenta con siete fechados inéditos, se fundó el sitio alrede...
The article can be downloaded freely from this link, through the end of January 2024:
https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1iFA43ic-FXsV8
The timing of Tiwanaku’s collapse remains contested. Here we present a generational-scale chronology of Tiwanaku using Bayesian models of 102 radiocarbon dates, including 45 unpublished dates. This chronology tracks four community practices: residing short- vs. long-term, constructing monuments, discarding decorated ceramics, and leaving human buri...
Resumen
El área de Laguna del Diamante (3.000 m snm) tiene una oferta de recursos atractiva para las sociedades humanas durante los últimos 2.000 años. Este trabajo evalúa la variable intensidad en la ocupación humana en Laguna del Diamante en cinco segmentos temporales entre 2030 y 440 años cal aP. Estos segmentos se modelaron a partir de 14 fecha...
Se presentan los resultados del análisis de un conjunto cerámico cuyos contextos de hallazgo corresponden a sitios emplazados en distintos ambientes altitudinales del noroeste de Mendoza, y cuyo marco cronológico incluye la totalidad del denominado período Medio de la etapa Agroalfarera del Centro Oeste Argentino. Con el objetivo de evaluar cambios...
In the central Argentine Andes, the earliest evidence of domestic crops, pottery, cemeteries, domestic camelids, and the bow and arrow dates from approximately two thousand years ago. In contrast to traditional expectations, these Neolithic changes did not occur together. To evaluate the synchronic or diachronic nature of these changes in northern...
The bow and arrow is a crucial component of Homo sapiens’ material culture. In South America, data on the bow and arrow are widely scattered, which motived this comprehensive compilation of archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic information. For millennia prior to the bow’s first appearance, hunters relied on the spearthrower. In the Andes...
In the central Argentine Andes, the earliest evidence of domestic crops, pottery, cemeteries, domestic camelids, and the bow and arrow dates from approximately two thousand years ago. In contrast to traditional expectations, these Neolithic changes did not occur together. To evaluate the synchronic or diachronic nature of these changes in northern...
Presentamos un estudio funcional de puntas de proyectil líticas procedentes de una región andina (31°S) con cronologías entre 6200 y 1760 años cal AP. La muestra corresponde al sitio Los Morrillos, Gruta 1 y 2 (San Juan, Argentina). Organizamos la historia ocupacional del sitio en tres fases: 1) 6200-5000 años cal AP, 2) 2530-2230 años cal AP y 3)...
Humans have engineered their environments throughout the Holocene, especially in the construction of hydraulic infrastructure. In many regions, however, this infrastructure is difficult to date, including the vestiges of water-management systems in the Andean highlands. Focusing on silt reservoirs in the upper Ica drainage, Peru, the authors use co...
Mobility is a key issue in the archaeology of southern South America, providing a lens through which multiple aspects of past social and economic organization can be visualized. Beyond this focus, there are multiple sources of behavioral variation that have little archaeological visibility and are thus seldom considered. However, the global ethnogr...
Transcurridos cincuenta años de la publicación del trabajo “Arqueología del valle de Uspallata, Provincia de Mendoza” escrito por Juan Schobinger en la revista Relaciones, actualizamos la nómina de sitios arqueológicos y sumamos evidencias, datos e interpretaciones generadas desde entonces por diversos equipos de investigación. Se incluyen además a...
Se presentan resultados sobre técnicas constructivas y patrones de ocupación del espacio, cronología, tecnología lítica, tipología y tecnología cerámica, zooarqueología de camélidos, antracología y arte rupestre, correspondientes a un conjunto de sitios arqueológicos del Área Natural Protegida Laguna del Diamante (Mendoza, Argentina). Esta área se...
Archaeologists have been using luminescence to date pottery in South America since the late 1970s, inspired by early success in northern Chile. However, luminescence dates have not been rigorously compared to independent dating methods, which this paper’s goal. First, we present a compilation of 94 paired ¹⁴ C and luminescence dates from the southe...
This paper revives a fascinating debate: did a drought start before, during, or after the collapse of the Andean polity of Tiwanaku? Here we present an alternate age model that highlights the real issue: the data from Lake Orurillo, no matter the age model, are too imprecise to address the question. The authors neglect the significance of four-cent...
Mobility is a key issue in the archaeology of southern South America, providing the lens through which multiple aspects of past social and economic organization are visualized. Beyond this focus, there are multiple sources of behavioral variation that have little archaeological visibility and are thus seldom considered. However, the global ethnogra...
The Andes are a unique geological and biogeographic feature of South America. From the perspective of human geography, this mountain range provides ready access to highly diverse altitudinally arranged ecosystems. The combination of a geologically and ecologically diverse landscape provides an exceptional context to explore the potential of stronti...
This study presents a discriminant analysis of projectile points (n = 44) from late Holocene contexts (~3100–400 cal BP) in the Argentine Andes (29–37° S). About two thousand years ago, the groups that inhabited the regions north and south of 34° S began divergent cultural histories. To the north, groups developed mixed economies that included dome...
We reconstruct the Holocene vegetation, climate, and archaeological history for drylands of northwestern Patagonia, Argentina, based on multiproxy analysis (plant macrofossil, pollen, and parasites) of rodent middens integrated with a database of {14}^C dates associated with human occupations. The local scale corresponds to the Huenul paleoecologic...
We present isotopic and morphometric evidence suggesting the migration of farmers in the southern Andes in the period AD 1270-1420, leading up to the Inka conquest occurring ~ AD 1400. This is based on the interdisciplinary study of human remains from archaeological cemeteries in the Andean Uspallata Valley (Argentina), located in the southern fron...
El Imperio Inca se extendió a lo largo de la cordillera de Los Andes, llegando en su extremo sur hasta la zona de centro norte de Chile y el centro oeste argentino. Investigaciones anteriores han rastreado la conquista inca y su influencia cultural fundamentalmente a través de la documentación etnohistórica, la cerámica y la arquitectura. El objeti...
Se presenta una síntesis de resultados de estudios geoarqueológicos de fuentes y canteras líticas ubicadas en ambientes de altura de Mendoza y San Juan (29°-34° S). Se comparan tres casos orientados a conocer la génesis de las rocas, su disponibilidad como recurso lítico, los modos de aprovisionamiento y los variables sistemas de producción. Los tr...
The Late Formative period immediately precedes the emergence of Tiwanaku, one of the earliest South American states, yet it is one of the most poorly understood periods in the southern Lake Titicaca Basin (Bolivia). In this article, we refine the ceramic chronology of this period with large sets of dates from eight sites, focusing on temporal infle...
Arthur Posnansky was the illustrious pioneer of Tiwanaku archaeology, remembered as a quixotic, flamboyant, and swashbuckling character. He was a naval officer, a businessman, and a scholar. He dedicated nearly fifty years of his life to the study of the Andean past, which resonates through the history of Bolivian archaeology. While clearly not the...
The study size patterns in projectile points (n=39) from six sites in the Argentine Andes (29–34°S) associated with 17 radiocarbon dates with medians spanning 3080–470 cal BP. This is the region’s first attempt to metrically distinguish arrows and darts, which is based on shoulder or maximum width, following Shott. The northern part of the study ar...
The Arid Diagonal has been one of South America's major biogeographic barriers and has isolated plant and animal communities throughout the Quaternary. It is located in the gap between the Andes’ two seasonal rainfall zones, including one of the driest deserts in the world, the Atacama. From there, the Arid Diagonal extends south over the Andes, cr...
Se ha realizado una investigación interdisciplinaria sobre los restos óseos humanos y acompañamientos funerarios procedentes del enterratorio Barrio Ramos I localizado en el valle de Uspallata (Mendoza, Argentina). Se rebate la asignación al Período Agroalfarero Tardío que se ha hecho de este sitio. Un estudio bayesiano de los fechados obtenidos y...
This paper evaluates chronological trends in the presence and absence of domestic animal bone (sheep, goat, and cattle) and pottery in Namaqualand, the proposed gateway to the rest of South Africa for early herders or hunter-gatherers with sheep and ceramics. We update date calibrations with local ΔR corrections and mixtures of recent calibration c...
Because the ¹⁴ C calibration curves IntCal and SHCal are based on data from temperate latitudes, it remains unclear which curve is more suitable for archaeological and paleoenvironmental records from tropical South America. A review of climate dynamics reveals a significant influx of Northern Hemisphere air masses and moisture over a substantial pa...
Los macrorrestos vegetales recuperados en el sitio Los Conitos (noroeste de Mendoza, Argentina) proporcionan evidencia del consumo y manejo de especies de plantas silvestres y domésticas. Con base en estos datos, el objetivo de este trabajo es mejorar nuestra comprensión del proceso socioeconómico de recolección y manejo de especies de plantas dura...
La cerámica más temprana marca un hito en la historia humana de los Andes del sur. Este trabajo propone una aproximación de la edad de la cerámica más temprana mediante modelos cronológicos basados en la estadística bayesiana. En estos, se comparan 84 fechados radiocarbónicos y de termoluminiscencia de 49 sitios que abarcan dos áreas en Argentina d...
Objectives: The goal of this paper is to assess the scale of human paleomobility and ecological complementarity between the lowlands and highlands in the southern Andes during the last 2300 years. By providing isotope results for human bone and teeth samples, we assess a hypothesis of ‘high residential mobility’ suggested on the basis of oxygen iso...
Summary of results from the 2016 IFR Field School. Field work included excavation at Cerro Tunduqueral and excavation and survey of the adjacent area, Uspallata Norte.
The chronology of the Inca Empire has traditionally relied on ethnohistoric dates, which suggest that a northern expansion into modern Ecuador began in AD 1463 and a southern expansion into modern Argentina began in AD 1471. We test the validity of these dates with two Bayesian models, which show that the ethnohistoric dates are incorrect and that...
A community is an active assemblage of human and non-human elements bound together by interactions. Archaeologies of communities shed light on sets of overlapping and geographically emplaced assemblages of individuals, practices, spaces, buildings, objects, animals and landscapes. This article presents an archaeology of communities based on a remar...
The mid-Holocene was an extremely dry period in the Lake Titicaca Basin of South America, when lake levels were at their lowest point in the Holocene. South of the lake, a lack of outflow and very low and irregular precipitation would have created desert-like conditions. This area's ‘archaeological silence’ seems to reflect an effective lack of pop...
In the southern Andes, Holocene climate records show drastic changes in moisture during the early and middle Holocene. To generate a more refined chronology of climate changes in this region, we present a Bayesian model that combines published cosmogenic dates from the Encierro Valley (29.1°S) and radiocarbon dates on peat and soils from the wester...
RESUMEN La osteometría, sumada a distintos análisis estadísticos, se presenta como una alternativa válida para la diferenciación interespecíica de camélidos sudamericanos. El presente trabajo pretende sintetizar los diferentes protocolos disponibles para la primera falange de camélidos, como así también realizar una comparación entre ellos. Con est...
Osteometry, combined with statistical analyses, is an effective means of differentiating South American camelid species. Different measurement protocols for the first phalange are synthesized and compared in this paper. Discrepant and equivalent measurements from different protocols are clarifiedin order to improve the methodology. Confusion betwee...
Castellano. El presente capítulo pretende refinar la cronología cultural del valle de Potrerillos (Mendoza, Argentina) disponible para el Holoceno medio y tardío. Se integran en el análisis seis sitios con 19 fechados radiocarbónicos calibrados y modelados con estadística de Bayes, empleada por primera vez en la región. Siete de ellos son inéditos,...
Resumen En este capítulo se estiman, de manera preliminar, las posibles vías de circulación/contacto que existieron en el área del río de Las Taguas Superior (en la frontera entre Chile y Argentina) durante los 290 años ac y los 670 años dc. Mediante un Sistema de Información Geográfica se realizan análisis de rutas de menor costo con el objeto de...
Tiwanaku is among the most prominent sites in the Andes. Despite nearly a century of research, it remains unclear when the site was founded, currently thought to be around 300 B.C. Excavations in 2008 in the Kk'araña sector present patterns suggested by previous research: the earliest material culture is from the first part of the Late Formative pe...
The development of sociopolitical complexity at Tiwanaku around AD 500 was one of the major episodes of social change in the history of the Lake Titicaca Basin. It was the result of poorly understood processes that took place at a series of ceremonial centers in the preceding centuries. The history of Tiwanaku during this time is especially unclear...
Actividades domésticas durante los siglos III-VIII d.C. en el valle de Potrerillos (San Ignacio-Mendoza). Un acercamiento desde la osteometría y la tecnología cerámica y lítica Resumen San Ignacio, en el Valle de Potrerillos, fue habitado durante los siglos III-VIII D.C. por grupos humanos que construyeron hornillos y ocuparon casas semi-subterráne...
Castellano
Este artículo presenta una descripción de los rasgos arquitectónicos domésticos del sitio Khonkho Wankane, ubicado en la región de Jesús de Machaca, Bolivia, a 30 km al sur del sitio Tiwanaku. Du-rante su principal ocupación, alrededor del 100-500 d.C., durante los últimos siglos del período Formativo Tardío, se construyeron tres templet...
[Into to presentation] The impetus for this paper comes from researching the early explorers in the area that I work in as an archeologist, northern Bolivia. The site of Tiwanaku, shown in the center of this map, (SLIDE 1) continues to be the most important site in the country, from the point of view of the archaeologist, politician, or tourist. Th...
Questions
Question (1)
I am working with the BIOCLIM data, with averaged values for ~1950–2000, which include monthly and seasonal averages. I am looking for a comparable data set for landcover data, specifically EVI, NDVI, and snow cover. The USGS servers offer monthly scenes, so I could manually download individual scenes from the last 50 years and average them... but I was hoping this has been done. Any ideas where I could find this data? Thanks!
