José M. Capriles

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at Pennsylvania State University

Significance The brightly colored feathers of macaws, amazons, and other neotropical parrots were one of the most important symbols of wealth, power, and sacredness in the pre-Columbian Americas. Andean highland and coastal societies imported these exotic goods from Amazonian tropical forests by little-understood mechanisms of exchange. The study o...

South America is a megadiverse continent that witnessed the domestication, translocation and cultivation of various plant species from seemingly contrasting ecosystems. It was the recipient and supplier of crops brought to and from Mesoamerica (such as maize and cacao, respectively), and Polynesia to where the key staple crop sweet potato was expor...

The radiocarbon dating record from sites in the territory that comprises the Plurinational State of Bolivia has been previously included in datasets that are either obsolete, inaccurate, or incomplete. The Bolivian Radiocarbon Database compiles over three thousand radiocarbon dates produced in the context of archaeological and other paleo-scientifi...

Radiocarbon dating is one of the most useful and widely used chronometric techniques available for archaeologists and other paleo-scientists. Although generally used for answering specific research questions, radiocarbon dates from archaeological sites have become increasingly used to reconstruct population change at meso and macro temporal and spa...

Stable isotope studies have revolutionised our understanding of food webs, subsistence, mobility and their change through time. In the Andes, dietary stable isotopic studies have often focused on timing the adoption of maize as a staple food and identifying camelid pastoralism in selected valleys of the Pacific coast. Few studies have focused on hi...

Manioc—also called cassava and yuca—is among the world’s most important crops, originating in South America in the early Holocene. Domestication for its starchy roots involved a near-total shift from sexual to clonal propagation, and almost all manioc worldwide is now grown from stem cuttings. In this work, we analyze 573 new and published genomes,...

For centuries the Cerro Rico of Potosí in the South American Andes has been known as the richest silver mine in the world but also as a notoriously challenging place for human habitation due to its extreme elevation. Nevertheless, little is known about the temporal depth and socioecological dynamics associated with the initial occupation of this re...

La investigación paleoetnobotánica está permitiendo documentar detalles cada vez más específicos acerca de la interacción entre sociedades humanas y su medio ambiente en el pasado. En el caso del desierto de Atacama en el norte de Chile, todas las plantas cultivadas, sin excepción, fueron introducidas de otras regiones donde fueron inicialmente dom...

Throughout history, many archaeological remains were taken out of the countries of their origin and are found in both private and public collections around the world. Fortunately, new heritage management paradigms encourage the return of some of these materials to their places of origin, but these processes are often complex and slow. In this artic...

The Lake Titicaca Basin was the setting for the emergence of complex societies such as the Tiwanaku state (AD 500-1150) and as such is one of the most investigated regions in the world, yet its underwater heritage has seen very limited research. In this chapter, we present the results of the taxonomic, anatomic, and taphonomic identification analys...

The squash family (Cucurbitaceae) contains some of the most important crops cultivated worldwide and has played an important ecological, economic, and cultural role for millennia. In the American tropics, squashes were among the first cultivated crop species, but little is known about how their domestication unfolded. Here, we employ direct radioca...

The La Prele Mammoth site (48CO1401), located in Converse County, Wyoming, contains a Clovis-age occupation associated with the remains of a subadult mammoth (Mammuthus columbi). In this paper, we present the geochronological and geoarchaeological context of the site. The La Prele Mammoth site is buried in an alluvial terrace of La Prele Creek, a t...

Textilization processes envisioned as technological transformation of animal fibres and the incorporation of textiles into human bodies, is analyzed among Chinchorro hunter gatherers, along the hyperarid Pacific coast of the Atacama Desert throughout the Holocene (ca. 7800–3500 cal BP). The Chinchorro, as producers and consumers of South American c...

The Late-Holocene history of hydroclimatic variability in the Atacama Desert offers insights into the effects of precipitation and humans on ecosystems in one of the most extremely arid regions of the world. However, understanding the effects of regional precipitation variability in relation to local ecological stressors remains to be fully resolve...

Animal sacrifice has played an important role as a material expression of the ritual behavior practiced by different societies around the world. In the South American Andes, the ceremonial immolation of llamas is well documented by both ethnohistoric and ethnographic sources. Nevertheless, archaeological evidence of animal sacrifice remains poorly...

Archaeologists increasingly use large radiocarbon databases to model prehistoric human demography (also termed paleo-demography). Numerous independent projects, funded over the past decade, have assembled such databases from multiple regions of the world. These data provide unprecedented potential for comparative research on human population ecolog...

Significance Food production systems are critical components in the emergence of complex socioecological systems. In the Andes, societal complexity has often been related to the increasing production and consumption of maize by elites, but the importance of highland cultivated crops, such as potatoes, one of the most cultivated crops in the world,...

Archaeologists and demographers increasingly employ aggregations of published radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates as demographic proxies summarizing changes in human activity in past societies. Presently, summed probability densities (SPDs) of calibrated radiocarbon dates are the dominant method of using ¹⁴C dates to reconstruct demographic trends. Unfortunate...

Explaining the stability of human populations provides knowledge for understanding the resilience of human societies to environmental change. Here, we use archaeological radiocarbon records to evaluate a hypothesis drawn from resilience thinking that may explain the stability of human populations: Faced with long-term increases in population densit...

Forecasting the effects of climate change on the distribution of Andean trees (Polylepis, Rosaceae) is important to understand how species respond to climate variability and to assess their resilience to the ongoing climate crisis. Here, paleodistribution modelling is used to assess distribution shifts of 17 Polylepis species during the Last Glacia...

Through paleoethnobotanical analysis, we illustrate mutualism between herding and cultivating crops among early Andean mobile pastoralists who lived in the Iroco region of the Central Altiplano of Bolivia during the Formative period (1500 BCE - 500 CE). These pastoralists, known as the Wankarani culture, cultivated quinoa, kañawa, and tubers even t...

A medida que el Imperio Inca se expandía por los Andes sudamericanos, el lago Titicaca se convirtió en su mítico lugar de origen y allí se construyó un complejo de peregrinaje centrado en la Isla del Sol. El complejo de peregrinaje incluía un arrecife subacuático donde se sumergían cajas de piedra que contenían costosas ofrendas rituales incluyendo...

Soil sustainability is reflected in a long-term balance between soil production and erosion for a given climate and geology. Here we evaluate soil sustainability in the Andean Altiplano where accelerated erosion has been linked to wetter climate from 4.5 ka and the rise of Neolithic agropastoralism in the millennium that followed. We measure in sit...

South America is well known for its abundance of Quaternary fossiliferous deposits, but well-preserved fossil remains from well-dated sites are scarce in the Atacama Desert and adjacent arid Andes. Here we report on a partially complete skeleton (46%) of a single young (ca. 3–4 years old) extinct horse discovered in the Salar de Surire, a salt flat...

Investigations of how past human societies managed during times of major climate change can inform our understanding of potential human responses to ongoing environmental change. In this study, we evaluate the impact of environmental variation on human communities over the last four millennia in the southern Lake Titicaca basin of the Andes, known...

The floristic composition and distribution of plant communities is the product of species-specific responses to localized environmental conditions often structured following environmental gradients. Although the importance of Andean high-elevation wetlands (bofedales) for provisioning ecosystem services has been critically emphasized in various stu...

As the Inca Empire expanded across the South American Andes during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD, Lake Titicaca became its mythical place of origin and the location of a pilgrimage complex on the Island of the Sun. This complex included an underwater reef where stone boxes containing miniature figurines of gold, silver and shell were sub...

As with most living organisms, human populations respond to climatic, environmental, and population pressures by transforming their range and subsistence strategies over space and time. An understanding of human ecology can be gained when the archaeological record is placed within the context of dynamic landscape changes and alterations in natural...

Archaeologists and demographers increasingly employ aggregations of published radiocarbon (14C dates) as demographic proxies summarizing changes in human activity in past societies. Presently, summed probability densities (SPDs) of calibrated radiocarbon dates are the dominant method of using 14C dates to reconstruct demographic trends. Unfortunate...

The onset of plant cultivation is one of the most important cultural transitions in human history1–4. Southwestern Amazonia has previously been proposed as an early centre of plant domestication, on the basis of molecular markers that show genetic similarities between domesticated plants and wild relatives4–6. However, the nature of the early human...

There are many unanswered questions about the population history of the Central and South Central Andes, particularly regarding the impact of large-scale societies, such as the Moche, Wari, Tiwanaku, and Inca. We assembled genome-wide data on 89 individuals dating from ∼9,000-500 years ago (BP), with a particular focus on the period of the rise and...

In vascular plants, larger seeds are generally associated with higher germination potential, healthier seedlings and overall higher rates of survivorship. How this relationship holds or what other physiological tradeoffs evolved in plants adapted to high-altitude environments, such as the tropical and subtropical highland Polylepis tree, remain unc...

En este trabajo se describen las relaciones que las sociedades humanas establecieron con su entorno durante el período Formativo (3000-1000 aP) en la Pampa del Tamarugal, Desierto de Atacama, desde una perspectiva teórico-metodológica que pone el acento en el potencial del registro ecofactual. Éste, al mediar entre lo cultural y lo ambiental, propo...

A synthetic history of human land use Humans began to leave lasting impacts on Earth's surface starting 10,000 to 8000 years ago. Through a synthetic collaboration with archaeologists around the globe, Stephens et al. compiled a comprehensive picture of the trajectory of human land use worldwide during the Holocene (see the Perspective by Roberts)....

Descargar libro completo en: https://www.total.bo/es/publicaciones Resultados de la labor de salvataje arqueológico realizada en el sitio Incahuasi 1, una necrópolis temprana de filiación Chané y Guaraní en inmediaciones de la planta de gas Incahuasi, en el Chaco Cruceño-Chuquisaqueño de Bolivia.

El hallazgo del cementerio de Incahuasi 1 es de singular importancia para la arqueología de las tierras bajas del Chaco boliviano y de los Andes del Sur. Con casi 3000 años de uso continuo (1944 a.C.-875 d.C.) este cementerio constituyó un importante referente social y sagrado para los pobladores de la región. Debido a sus fechas tempranas este sit...

From the perspective of Central and South America, the peopling of the New World was a complex process lasting thousands of years and involving multiple waves of Pleistocene and early Holocene period immigrants entering into the neotropics. These Paleoindian colonists initially brought with them technologies developed for adaptation to environments...

The long-term response of ancient societies to climate change has been a matter of global debate. Until recently, the lack of integrative studies using archaeological, palaeoecological and palaeoclimatological data prevented an evaluation of the relationship between climate change, distinct subsistence strategies and cultural transformations across...

La entidad arqueológica Goya-Malabrigo es una de las más conspicuas en la arqueología del nordeste argentino (NEA) y, junto con la Guaraní, es la que ha sido mejor definida y carac-terizada. Fue reconocida desde el inicio de la arqueología argentina (Ambrosetti 1894; Outes 1918) y con diferentes nombres y criterios ha sido una unidad de análisis pe...

Significance Humans have a long history of using natural resources, especially plants, to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. Imbibing substances derived from plants have been linked to ancient and elaborate knowledge systems and rituals. While archaeological evidence of the consumption of psychotropics, such as alcohol or caffeine, dates b...

Significance Ritual and religion are significant factors in primary or archaic state formation. These beliefs and practices not only legitimize these new political organizations in their ability to control supernatural forces, but also incentivize intragroup cooperation by punishing freeloading and rewarding cooperative behavior. Recent archaeologi...

The Amazon witnessed the emergence of complex societies after 2500 years ago that altered tropical landscapes through intensive agriculture and managed aquatic systems. However, very little is known about the context and conditions that preceded these social and environmental transformations. Here, we demonstrate that forest islands in the Llanos d...

The social groups that initially inhabited the hyper arid core of the Atacama Desert of northern Chile during the late Pleistocene integrated a wide range of local, regional and supra regional goods and ideas for their social reproduction as suggested by the archaeological evidence contained in several open camps in Pampa del Tamarugal (PdT). Local...

A key concern regarding current and future climate change is the possibility of sustained droughts that can have profound impacts on societies. As such, multiple paleoclimatic proxies are needed to identify megadroughts, the synoptic climatology responsible for these droughts, and their impacts on past and future societies. In the hyperarid Atacama...

En este capítulo se explora la aplicación del programa Maxent como una herramienta para predecir la distribución potencial de poblaciones humanas pasadas y el rol de la variabilidad ambiental. Se utilizó como caso de estudio la entidad arqueológica Goya-Malabrigo, con dos objetivos principales: a) precisar objetivamente los parámetros ambientales a...

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-altitu...

Significance The multiproxy approach represents a novel methodology and a unique opportunity to obtain a more detailed view of ancient resource use. Our multiproxy study, carried out on gomphotheres from Chile, widens potential occupied habitats to closed-canopy forests. This habitat variability supports the hypothesis that the diet of gomphotheres...

The hyperarid conditions of the Atacama Desert preserve remarkable evidence of ancient human foragers beginning at least 13,000 years ago. Although initially considered a harsh and inhospitable environment, recent interdisciplinary research suggests that the Atacama was originally inhabited by highly mobile hunter-gatherers bearing complex technolo...

Trepanation has been practiced in the Andes since 400 – 200 B.C.E., with numerous examples documented across Peru and Northern Bolivia (Tello 1913; Verano 2016). This practice appears to have been widespread across these areas; however, other parts of the Andes, such as Northwest Argentina, Chile, and Southern Bolivia, have not yet produced example...

"The Tarapacá Declaration" draws attention to the urgent need to change how human societies have been using water in the Atacama Desert, based on a historical trajectory spanning several millennia. The Declaration, an initiative that summarizes the results of the CONICYT/PIA, Anillo project SOC1405, is oriented towards civil society and various pol...

The Altiplano constitutes the most extensive, high-elevation terrain in South America. Most archaeological research on the earliest human occupation of this region in the Bolivian Andes derives from sites such as Viscachani where the emphasis has been on typological comparisons of projectile points, rather than on complete and radiometrically dated...

Primary questions regarding the foraging behaviour of the first hunter–gatherers who colonized the New World are how they found, procured and utilized high‐quality raw materials for manufacturing stone tools. In this paper, we present evidence from the late Pleistocene site of Cueva Bautista in the highlands of south‐western Bolivia, which demonstr...

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...

El "Acta de Tarapacá" constituye un llamado de atención sobre la necesidad de cambiar la manera como las sociedades humanas han estado utilizando el agua en el Desierto de Atacama, mediante una perspectiva histórica a lo largo de milenios. El Acta, una iniciativa que resume los resultados del proyecto CONICYT/PIA Anillo SOC1405 "Cambios Sociales y...

One of the less well-understood problems in paleoscience is the role of climate as a modulator of long-term changes in human demography, and, in turn, how changes in human demography influence climate because demography also determines how individuals choose to modify ecosystems. Our workshop compared the long-term interaction between climate, huma...

Current scientific evidence shows that humans colonized South America at least 15,000 years ago, but there are still many unknown aspects of this process, including the major and minor migratory routes involved, and the pattern of successive occupation of a diverse continental mosaic of ecosystems. In this context, the role of the Andean highlands...

In order to contrast the hypothesis of the existence of a vast cultural exchange network between the Amazon Region, the Central Altiplano and the Pacific coast, the archeological evidence related to the consumption of psychoactive substances in Northern Chile is examined. The avail-able evidence is interpreted configuring some propositions concerni...

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine South American population structure and prehistoric population displacements prior to the Spanish conquest, utilizing mitochondrial DNA haplogroups of extant mixed populations from Mexico, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Method: Relative fr...

The high Andes of western South America feature extreme ecological conditions that impose important physiological constraints on humans including high-elevation hypoxia and cold stress. This leads to questions regarding how these environments were colonized by the first waves of humans that reached them during the late Pleistocene. Based on previou...

Premise of research. Anemophily is considered to be a mechanism that evolved to promote pollination success. However, reproductive output can decrease if pollen loads are scarce due to low abundance of compatible mates or floral infections. Here we analyze the effects of breeding system, pollen limitation, and a potential floral fungal infection on...

One of the least understood aspects of paleoscience is the role of climate in controlling long-term human population, and, in turn, how changes in population influence the strategies that individuals use to manage resources. Understanding the nexus between climate, human population and the management of resources is important in a world where clima...

Prehistoric human groups in the Atacama Desert developed socio-cultural complexities despite living in the world’s driest desert. Different technological adaptations were developed as part of their interactions with variable environments over the last 14,000 years.

Understanding how human societies interacted with environmental changes is a major goal of archaeology and other socio-natural sciences. In this paper, we assess the human-environment interactions in the Pampa del Tamarugal (PDT) basin of the Atacama Desert over the last 13,000 years. By relying on a socio-environmental model that integrates ecosys...

The Northern Titicaca Basin Survey: Huancané-Putina. CHARLES STANISH, CECILIA CHÁVEZ JUSTO, KARL LAFAVRE, and AIMÉE PLOURDE. 2014. Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology Number 56, Studies in Latin American Ethnohistory & Archaeology Volume IX. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. xvi + 407 pp. $38.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-915703-84-5.

The Northern Titicaca Basin Survey: Huancané-Putina. Stanish Charles , Justo Cecilia Chávez , Lafavre Karl , and Plourde Aimée . 2014. Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology Number 56, Studies in Latin American Ethnohistory & Archaeology Volume IX. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. xvi + 407 pp. $38.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-915703-84-5. - Volume 27 I...

In the Lluta Valley, northern Chile, climate is hyperarid and vegetation is restricted to the valley floors and lowermost footslopes. Fossil tree trunks and leaves of predominantly Escallonia angustifolia, however, are abundant up to ∼15 m above the present valley floor, where they are intercalated with slope deposits, reflecting higher water level...

Andean pastoralism has long been considered a unique form of animal husbandry that is not comparable to Old World nomadic traditions. Recent archaeological research has revealed that camelid pastoralism (the herding of llamas and alpacas) evolved independently in the New World. The essays in this book explore the archaeology of pastoralist societie...

En este capítulo se exponen los resultados de investigaciones arqueológicas llevadas a cabo en el municipio de Mojocoya del departamento de Chuquisaca, Bolivia. A partir de una prospección extensiva, se presentan nuevos datos acerca de patrones de asentamiento, componentes culturales, arte rupestre y prácticas funerarias en esta región durante la é...

ABSTRACT. SIGHTINGS OF THE RUFOUS-THROATED DIPPER (CINCLUS SCHULZI) IN CORDILLERA DE SAMA, BOLIVIA.— We present sighting data of the Rufous-throated Dipper (Cinclus schulzi) in Cordillera de Sama, Tarija Department, Bolivia. We visited 17 rivers and streams, but we attained only 12 sightings in 4 water courses, corresponding to a minimum of 10 indi...

The relations between humans and animals extend into socio-cultural aspects that go beyond the mere acquisition of food, meaning that animals constitute cultural resources that fulfill diverse roles in social and cultural systems. Visual images in different media, including rock art, represent one of the ways in which these complex relationships ta...