Marcela Sepúlveda

University of Tarapacá | UTA · Departamento de Ciencias Sociales

From the literature research review of studies that involved the physicochemical characterization of rock art paintings in Argentina and Chile, we evaluate the impact of this analytic approach in our understanding of these visual and material practices in the southern region of South America. We identify the techniques, protocols and sample prepara...

This work concerns the study of colors and dyes identified on archaeological textiles from the Atacama Desert. The different garments and ornaments come from the excavation of two important pre-Columbian cemeteries of the Tarapacá region: Tarapacá-40 attributed to the Formative period (1100 BC–660 AD) and Pica-8 to the Late Intermediate period (900...

The prehistory of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile has been constructed around certain traditional classes of objects, such as ceramics and lithics, following the Old World and North American standards. As such, color has been relegated to an invisible status, despite its essential visible qualities and color's importance in the region's social...

The study of rock art in South America has become a particularly relevant topic in the archaeology developed throughout the different countries within the continent. In this context, anthropology’s methodological and theoretical contribution has become particularly fruitful in specifying the meaning of rock art and involving the communities around...

Basta con observar nuestro entorno para constatar que prácticamente todo tiene color. Durante miles de años, los colores han sido un medio importante para comunicar mensajes de nuestra cotidianeidad, evidenciar ciertos eventos específicos de la vida (unión en pareja, ritos de pasos a cierta edad), participar de rituales relacionados con la imitació...

Resumen La agricultura fue una actividad fundamental de las comunidades aldeanas de las tierras altas de Arica en los Andes centro sur, durante el período Intermedio tardío (1100-1450 dC), hasta convertirse en uno de los principales propósitos de la expansión inca en la región en los siglos quince y dieciséis. Este trabajo presenta el hallazgo, en...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0302465.].

The article explores advanced image processing techniques for pigment discrimination in rock art paintings, emphasizing color separation using RGB (red, green, blue) and LHCUv (Luminance, Hue, Chroma) imagery. It highlights the use of dimensionality reduction methods such as Principal Components Analisys PCA and Independent Component Analysis (ICA)...

The chapter presents the first direct radiocarbon dating of the popular three-masted balsa miniatures used in the Central South Andean coast during pre-Columbian times, from materials from museum collections in Chile and Europe. The results allow us to define the precise chronology of these miniatures and to discuss whether the life-size models of...

We present the results of the excavations and analyses of the diverse and exceptional archaeological assemblage of Taguatagua 3, a new late Pleistocene site located in the ancient Tagua Tagua lake in Central Chile (34°S). The anthropogenic context is constrained in a coherently dated stratigraphic deposit which adds new information about the mobili...

The timing for the evolution of the capacity to inscribe the landscape with rock art has global relevance. While this was an in-built capacity when Homo sapiens first colonized the Americas, the heterogeneous distribution of rock art shows that it was a facultative behavior arising under unknown socioecological conditions. Patagonia was the last re...

Pigmentos más allá del color. Exposición científica Manifestación Artística: Carteles científicos-Fotografía-materiales geológicos-pigmentos naturales. La presente exposición está dirigido preferentemente tanto a personas interesadas profesionalmente en las disciplinas de prehistoria, arqueología y antropología social, como a estudiantes, y a todas...

El sitio Cueva La Capilla 1 es un contexto clave para entender los procesos de cambio social que vivieron las comunidades cazadoras, recolectoras y pescadoras costeras hacia fines del período Arcaico en la costa exorreica del extremo norte de Chile, Desierto de Atacama. Presentamos el análisis de múltiples evidencias provenientes de excavaciones re...

¿Cómo se vincula el color con el arte y la minería? Para responder a esta pregunta –en un poco más de veinte años de investigación– la arqueóloga Marcela Sepúlveda partió por analizar el arte rupestre pintado al interior de cuevas y aleros, para luego estudiar el uso de pigmentos en cuerpos momificados y otros objetos y contextos arqueológicos. Su...

La Puna Seca en el extremo norte de Chile constituye un espacio de significativa relevancia para abordar la relación humano-animal, al situarse entre dos de los principales focos de domesticación de camélidos en la región andina. En el presente trabajo, ofrecemos una primera síntesis de los análisis arqueozoológicos de catorce sitios de cazadores r...

The evidence for the cult of water among humans and the link with the oceans is significant. Throughout this project we have wanted to show some examples of how nature, biodiversity and aquatic species were key elements of an original ecological-cultural symbiosis on the part of the peoples and human groups of the past, and also of the present. Bec...

Proyecto de Investigación y Divulgación Cientifica "The Sense of Water. A journey from prehistoric times: European Researchers' Nigth (Spain). Plan Propio de Investigación Universidad de Sevilla. Naciones Unidas. Red Iberoamericana de Investigación en Manifestaciones Rupestres en América Latina (2022).

Through our research at Bahía Yendegaia on the Beagle Channel in southernmost Patagonia-the ancestral territory of the Yagán people-we discovered the first rock art site on Tierra del Fuego Island. The geometric visual images found at Yende-gaia Rockshelter present motifs and compositions analogous to those recorded at other sites on the southern a...

En este trabajo presentamos un análisis zooarqueológico de las relaciones humano-camélido durante el Holoceno en la Puna de Atacama (norte de Chile y Noroeste argentino) a través del estudio de composiciones rupestres interpretadas como escenas de caza durante el lapso entre 9700 y 2500 aP. Estas representaciones aluden a interacciones sociales y a...

Infographic for the World Pigments Day (March 22), where the study of natural, synthetic, biological and geological pigments is celebrated. From a scientific divulgation point of view, we present the study of pigments and their symbolism in rock art.

Red, white and black are colours commonly found in rock paintings around the globe. In northern Chile's Atacama Desert, visual representations produced between 2000 BC and 1550 CE also include yellow, orange, violet, blue and green. This polychrome usage is particularly notable in the dress of anthropomorphs and is characterised by extreme attentio...

Este trabajo nos lleva a reflexionar por primera vez sobre variadas dimensiones del color en el pasado prehispánico del desierto de Atacama, a partir del estudio de su materialidad y expresión en objetos que forman parte de la colección de Aníbal Echeverría y Reyes, hoy depositada en el Museo Nacional de Historia Natural. Se describe brevemente la...

Así, sin detenernos demasiado sobre sus particularidades materiales (técnicas de manufactura o los distintos materiales que ensamblan, por ejemplo) ni morfológicas (formas, tamaños, eventuales decoraciones, entre otros), centramos el presente trabajo en el análisis del volumen y la naturaleza del contenido de dos clases de estos contenedores: aquel...

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is a statistical technique for decomposing information from datasets into maximally independent components. ICA allows the researcher to recover two or more independent signals that appear mixed within the same dataset. This paper shows ICA to be an extremely effective method for separating different colours fou...

The surveys carried out during the year 2007 in the Pampa Oxaya sector of the foothills of Arica, Northern Chile, allowed to identify the existence of a dozen rock shelters with rock art which were unknown until the date. The painted images were approached integrally by a methodology at different scales. This tool is detailed at the motive, panel,...

https://www.springeropen.com/collections/pdclaai Meetings held in different Latin American countries since 2011 have evidenced how significant heritage science studies have become in the analysis of pigments and dyes of pre-Hispanic and historical periods in this part of the world. Our objective on this occasion is to bring together a series of w...

El arte rupestre y las rutas de circulación sirven de insumo para comprender la precordillera de la región de Tarapacá como un espacio de conectividad regional y de encuentro entre las localidades de Mamiña, Quipisca e Iquiuca. Desde una perspectiva transdisciplinaria en la que se funden la arqueología, la historia y la etnografía, esta investigaci...

Presentación editorial del NÚMERO ESPECIAL de la Revista CUADERNOS DE ARTE PREHISTÓRICO donde se publican parte de los trabajos presentados en el simposio “Rock art and human use of space in desert landscapes: a comparative perspective”, coordinado por las autoras y desarrollado en el marco del XX Congreso Internacional de Arte Rupestre IFRAO (XX I...

Pachacamac is the name of the 15th-16th century Inca sanctuary on the Peruvian coast as well as the name of one of the principal oracles of Inca divinities. This effigy would have been destroyed by Pizarro in 1533 during his visit to the great monumental complex, and as such the originality and antiquity of the wooden statue—the so-called Pachacama...

A previously undocumented type of wetland is described from the Atacama Desert in northern Chile (3000 m above sea level), sustained exclusively by direct precipitation and perched above the regional water table. Geomorphological mapping, pedostratigraphy, geochemistry, and analysis of contemporary vegetation is used to understand wetland formation...

The distribution and location of Naturalistic Tradition rock art paintings from the Precordillera (western foothills of the Andean Cordillera), in northernmost Chile, are discussed. Stylistic similarities in rock art suggest a connection between different sites and the construction of a specific symbolic territory and cultural landscape, where info...

The mineral richness of the Atacama Desert permitted the development of a diverse array of mining activities, including the production of metals, lapidary, and pigments, which developed into significant sociocultural practices for desert dwellers throughout the occupation of the region. El Cóndor mine is an important hematite source located in the...

Rock art in the precordillera (2500-3800 masl) of Chile’s far north has generally been described at the macro or regional scale, omitting the particularities of the individual archaeological localities in which it is found. This paper presents the findings of a stylistic study of one of the region’s foremost rock painting sectors, Pampa El Muerto (...

Though they are generally characterized on the basis of faunal remains or lithic industries, in the highlands of northernmost Chile, the cultural aspects of the socio-economic changes, between Archaic and Formative periods (6000–1500 years BP), from hunter-gatherer to pastoral modes of life, a consequence of the domestication of camelids, can be di...

The Andean church of San Andrés de Pachama is located in the highland of the northernmost of Chile, near the limit with Bolivia and next to the Ruta de la Plata. This commercial route contributed in the past to the transport and commerce of various raw materials, such as silver, from the Andean mountains region to the Pacific Ocean coast and then t...

In this essay we seek to define different expressions of perspective used in rock art, with the specification of multiple variants for their identification and analysis. Discussed in general in relation to the conception and representation of space, we illustrate our purposes with several examples from northern Chile, in particular from the Precord...

The study of form or morphology is one of the fundamental bases of classification analysis in the archaeology of art. Unlike anthropology that denied the study of art almost entirely until the 1960s (Morphy 1994), archaeology of art was established at the beginning of the twentieth century. It began with the study of form as general configuration o...

Fire was essential for the ancient inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, at the southernmost end of the Americas. The Fuegians, as these human groups are traditionally known, produced fire primarily by striking a piece of iron pyrite against a flint nodule. Several European chroniclers mention this firestone technology and note its social value, a concl...

Commentary to Gallardo's article about a Synthesis of rock art from Atacama Desert: style, interaction and visual informations flow along time.

El presente ensayo relaciona los estilos de arte rupestre de la región atacameña con las formas de interacción social a lo largo del tiempo, desde el periodo Arcaico Tardío al Colonial (ca. 3000 a.C.-1800 d.C.). A partir de la información arqueológica disponible y de un largo programa de estudios, se propone que los estilos rupestres no sólo expres...

Book index: Arqueometría. Estudios analíticos de materiales arqueológicos.

Este libro constituye una primera recopilación de técnicas arqueométricas elementales, moleculares, de datación y de prospección, además de casos de estudio originales en los cuales la utilización de estos análisis contribuyó con resultados enriquecedores y significativos a la interpretación arqueológica de variadas dimensiones materiales y cultura...

A set of dates, from a summary of excavations and of analyses of associated material from the upper basin of the Azapa valley, around the Tignamar River (2,800 and 3,800 masl), allows us to discuss the occurrence of socio-cultural processes, between cal. 1,500 BC-650 AD, in the Precordillera (foothills) of the far north of Chile. Defined in general...

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...

" Ciencia y política en la arqueología chilena: el caso de Fondecyt ". El conjunto de todos estos investigadores fue coordinado por Andrés Troncoso para el dossier sobre arqueología, productividad científica y política en Chile, publicado en el número 35 de la Revista Chilena de Antropología. Palabras clave: arqueología, Chile, ciencia, conicyt, po...

Omics technologies have far-reaching applications beyond clinical medicine. A case in point is the analysis of ancient hair samples. Indeed, hair is an important biological indicator that has become a material of choice in archeometry to study the ancient civilizations and their environment. Current characterization of ancient hair is based on elem...

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...

Micro-Raman spectroscopy was used to analyze and identify pigments and determine the palette of color in wall paintings from four churches of the Colonial Period, in the Bolivian highlands. The ancient churches Santiago de Callapa, Curahuara de Carangas, Nuestra Señora de Copacabana de Andamarca and San José de Soracachi were constructed during the...

The mobility patterns of Archaic hunter-gatherers (10,500-3,700 BP) from the highlands of northern Chile have been commonly defined based on the characterization and comparison of lithic materials and, to a lesser extent, on the study of rock art painting found in caves and rock shelters. Other archaeological records have been mentioned occasionall...

Arqueología del territorio aldeano prehispánico tardío en los Altos de Arica: aportes de la fotointerpretación satelital para el estudio regional de la cuenca alta de Azapa Resumen Se presentan la metodología y los primeros resultados de un estudio regional del poblamiento prehispánico tardío de la cuenca alta de Azapa en la precordillera de la reg...

En este trabajo entregamos una primera caracterización de las pinturas rupestres de la cuenca hidrográfica del río Limarí, que se asocian a grupos cazadores recolectores del Holoceno Tardío Inicial (ca. 2000 ac a 500 dc). A partir de análisis físicoquímicos moleculares, como microscopía y espectroscopía Raman, se identifican los pigmentos utilizado...

Bark cloth (‘tapa/kapa’) is a fabric made from beaten plant fibres. In the Pacific tapa made of paper mulberry has been of great cultural importance and its use is associated with both utilitarian and ceremonial contexts. In the 19th century, traditional bark cloth was largely replaced by Western cloth. On some islands, tapa making was banished wit...

Archeological ceramic paste material typically consists of a mix of a clay matrix and various millimeter and sub-millimeter sized mineral inclusions. Micro X-ray fluorescence (XRF) is a standard compositional classification tool and in this work we propose and demonstrate an improved fluorescence map processing protocol where the mineral inclusions...

Biodeterioration of cultural heritage artifacts due to microbial activity presents a significant challenge to conservators and museums around the World. A collection of Chinchorro mummies recovered from the Atacama Desert (the oldest artificial mummies ever found, dating back to 5050 B.C.E.) has been stored in the Universidad de Tarapacá, northern...

This article reviews the principal studies in rock art research in Chile, including engravings, paintings and geoglyphs, carried out in the course of the last five years (2010-2014). Our review expands the account presented before for different regions of the country, between 2005 and 2009 (Sepúlveda and Valenzuela 2012) and for studies carried out...

In the last few years, hair has become a major medium for toxicological, environmental and forensics studies, providing complementary information to urine and blood analyses. When it is well preserved thanks to extreme environmental conditions, ancient hair also represents a material of choice in archaeology to study ancient civilizations and their...

LITHIC ANALYSIS AND SITE FUNCTIONALITY OF THE ROCK SHELTERS FROM THE PRECORDILLERA OF ARICA (SOUTH CENTRAL ANDEAN AREA) DURING THE ARCHAIC PERIOD (CA. 10,000-3700 YEARS BP). The role of precordillera of Arica in the highlands of South Central Andean area during the Archaic period (ca. 10,000 to 3700 yr BP) is discussed based on site functionality,...