'When the whirlwind is moving over the sand': poetic surrealism of Atacama's archaeological landscapes

Abstract

Since the nineteenth century, the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile has been a space of geopolitical tension, asymmetrical socioeconomic power, and a territory for mining extractivism. The knowledge of its natural and cultural resources was assembled by scientific expeditions defining and configuring what we understand as a 'desert, ' a peripheral empty and arid space ready to be occupied and exploited. The irruption and expansion of capitalist extractivism created a particular idea of landscape and reconfigured its socio-political contours. Archaeological, scientific, and artistic expeditions actively participated in this 'becoming desert' process. This article examines some trajectories constituting the Atacama Desert as an extractive and sacrificial territory. We propose the notion of 'sur-realistic landscapes, ' and we use the poetry of the Chilean Canadian poet Ludwig Zeller to highlight the surreal condition of contemporary mate-rialities, constantly feeding the archaeological imagination of Atacama.

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‘When the whirlwind is moving over the sand’:
poetic surrealism of Atacama’s archaeological
landscapes
Francisco Rivera & Damir Galaz-Mandakovic
To cite this article: Francisco Rivera & Damir Galaz-Mandakovic (28 May 2024): ‘When the
whirlwind is moving over the sand’: poetic surrealism of Atacama’s archaeological landscapes,
Landscape Research, DOI: 10.1080/01426397.2024.2358251
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2024.2358251
Published online: 28 May 2024.
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LANDSCAPE RESEARCH
‘When the whirlwind is moving over the sand’: poetic
surrealism of Atacama’s archaeological landscapes
Francisco Riveraa,b and Damir Galaz-Mandakovica
aInstituto de Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Museo, Universidad Católica del Norte, San Pedro de Atacama,
Chile; bThe Archaeology Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
ABSTRACT
Since the nineteenth century, the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile has
been a space of geopolitical tension, asymmetrical socioeconomic power,
and a territory for mining extractivism. The knowledge of its natural and
cultural resources was assembled by scientific expeditions defining
and configuring what we understand as a ‘desert,’ a peripheral empty
and arid space ready to be occupied and exploited. The irruption and
expansion of capitalist extractivism created a particular idea of landscape
and reconfigured its socio-political contours. Archaeological, scientific, and
artistic expeditions actively participated in this ‘becoming desert’ process.
This article examines some trajectories constituting the Atacama Desert
as an extractive and sacrificial territory. We propose the notion of ‘sur-
realistic landscapes,’ and we use the poetry of the Chilean Canadian poet
Ludwig Zeller to highlight the surreal condition of contemporary mate-
rialities, constantly feeding the archaeological imagination of Atacama.
Introduction
What is real? What is imaginary?
Half of our life is lived in dreams
(Wald & Zeller, 1983, p. 20).
In 1884, Chile fulfilled its nationalist dream of territorial expansion. Chile and Bolivia signed a
truce that ended the war between the two countries, pretentiously called the War of the Pacific.
Although the conflict continued between Chile and Peru, Bolivia excluded itself and thus
accepted the de facto administration of part of its territory. Chile, the invading country, then
annexed the Antofagasta region, an area of 126 049 km2, consisting almost entirely of the arid
lands of the Atacama Desert.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Atacama Desert has been identified as a
space of geopolitical tension and asymmetrical socioeconomic power, functioning as a labo-
ratory for mining extractivism and creating ‘sacrifice zones’ (Lerner, 2010) for its purposes,
such as Tocopilla, Gatico, Ollagüe and Chuquicamata (Galaz-Mandakovic, Tapia Araya, & Rivera,
2023; Galaz-Mandakovic & Rivera, 2023). The irruption and expansion of capitalist extractivism
configured the desert as a liminal zone of exclusion, a region with specific socio-political
© 2024 Landscape Research Group Ltd
CONTACT Francisco Rivera f.riveraamaro@gmail.com
KEYWORDS
Extractivism; imagination;
surrealism; storytelling;
Atacama Desert
https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2024.2358251

2 F. RIVERA AND D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC
contours within a real and imagined landscape. In this article, we propose to examine the
Atacama Desert’s archaeological imagination by juxtaposing historical and poetic narratives,
arguing that these connections are surrealist as conceived, for example, by the Atacama-born
poet Ludwig Zeller, whose poetry and visual art we rely on allegorically. Surrealist literature
and art, such as Ludwig Zeller’s, allow us to think about desert imaginaries and the genealogy
of the assemblages of agents, landscapes, and objects that have configured the Atacama
Desert as a sacrificial space structured by post-war economic and cultural extractivism. Through
a montage of surrealist images, we delve into narratives that portray Atacama as a landscape
defined by absence and emptiness and explore how the desert is the central character of
diverse historical narratives for various individuals, groups, and ideologies. Deeply inspired
by scholars working in ‘arid lands’ (Davis, 2016) and surreal Anthropocene contexts (Wilson,
2023), we address the Atacama Desert as constituted by landscapes, imaginaries, storytelling,
and materialities to understand its trajectory as a subaltern territory bound to a global
economy.
Zeller’s art and poetry speak to the relationship between the desert and archaeology, breaking
down conventional ‘bodies,’ whether objects or identities and juxtaposing dreamlike and unpre-
dictable materials. Bringing anthropologist James Clifford’s notion of ethnographic surrealism
and its insistence on ‘cultural impurities and disturbing syncretisms’ (Clifford, 1988, p. 131) to
archaeological thinking, we examine how scientific and poetic perspectives shaped the Atacama
desertic landscape’s social imaginary. We delve into how people imagine their social existence
through images, anecdotes, and stories, how archaeological imagination creates a landscape
like the Atacama Desert, and how capitalist extractivism goes beyond mere extraction of natural
resources. We borrow the term archaeological imagination from archaeologist Michael Shanks
to denote the ‘creative capacity mobilised when we experience traces and vestiges of the past,
when we gather, classify, conserve, and restore when we work with such remains, collections,
archives to deliver narratives, reconstructions, accounts, explanations, or whatever’ (Shanks,
2020, p. 47).
Zeller proposed, as Clifford pointed out, that ‘the world was permanently surrealist’ (Clifford,
1988, p. 119). Atacama forms geographies and imaginaries configured by archaeological mate-
rialities that can be considered surrealist from an outsider’s perspective. We use an archaeo-
logical perspective on Atacama’s landscape to highlight both the multitemporality of its material
remains, a palimpsest of objects, places, and experiences (Olivier, 2008), and the critical role
of scientific expeditions as another event in its biographical history (Rivera, 2022). To show it,
we use three narrative axes—madness, the epic, and sacrifice—which serve as principles of
aesthetic organisation and literary figures to examine extractivism and imagination in the
desert. Using these three narrative axes through, respectively, the work of the writer Jose
Miguel Varas, the International High-Altitude Expedition (IHAE), and the poet Pablo Neruda,
this article is a collage and a metonymic assemblage of texts and photographs superimposed
on the linear form of historical narratives. Through a reflective exploration, we open speculative
questions to think about a little-studied subject: the narratives that constitute the Atacama
Desert as a sacrificial extractive territory of natural and cultural resources. We examine the
figure of the desert by confronting historical sources, experiences, and materials, arguing that
poetic and scientific narratives played a significant role in configuring the Atacama Desert
imaginaries.
Extractive capitalism and surrealist collages
‘A thousand years I have been buried here, the echoes/Little by little, like schrapnel, fly from the noise/
The worn-out casks that broke apart and the wind/Turned against the clock its old grappling-hooks, its
enraged rags’ (Zeller, 1979, p. 104) (Figure 1).

LANDSCAPE RESEARCH 3
The Atacama Desert has long been a place for the entangled history of science and capitalism
(Rieppel, Lean, & Deringer, 2018), of extracting natural resources and scientific knowledge. It is
a territory of imagined pasts and future potentialities; for example, as a test laboratory for outer
space travel and an ‘analog model of Mars’ (Azua-Bustos, González-Silva, & Fairén, 2022) or as
a viable territory for installing a nuclear power plant (Comisión Chilena de Energía Nuclear,
2018). Above all, this territory is seen as a resource. The State, mining capitals, and scientific
expeditions appropriated it in unequal, combined, and contradictory ways. With the incorporation
of the Atacama Desert into Chilean sovereignty in 1884, government-led expeditions began to
explore the economic potential of its natural resources. Simultaneously, interest in its cultural
resources also intensified, and a vast array of archaeological artefacts were extracted from the
desert to integrate within the private collections of travellers, explorers, treasure hunters, and
scientists (Ballester, 2021; Carter, Vilches, & Santoro, 2017). The extraction of the Atacama Desert’s
cultural heritage can thus be added to Eduardo Gudynas’ definition of extractivism as the
commercial exploitation of natural resources for export purposes (Gudynas, 2018). Thereby, the
desert has a multitude of existences formed by material remains scattered in a surrealistic
landscape that expands beyond its geographical setting. Material collections, including objects
hosted in foreign museums, create an imaginary of the desert as a space to extract heritage
resources (Figure 1). As Rieppel etal. (2018, p. 7) pointed out: ‘Not only do ideas circulate, but
they are also accumulated in “centers of calculation” such as museums, libraries, and all of the
other institutions that collectively make up the epistemic infrastructure for knowledge produc-
tion.’ For example, a pre-Hispanic mining hammer donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in
Toronto by a certain Dr. H. George (Arni Brownstone, personal communication, February 18,
2021) speaks of specialised extractive activities in the Chuquicamata mine and probably came
from one of the sites described by Isaiah Bowman in his 1907 expedition or from ancient mining
camps, such as Chu-2, dated to 780–1020 AD (Núñez, Agüero, Cases, & De Souza, 2003). A
particular assemblage of stone, wood, and rawhide made to extract copper, this hammer is also
part of a larger assemblage mobilising museum collections, collectors’ networks, and scientific
knowledge (Ballester, 2021).
Natural and cultural extractivism are critical in configuring Atacama’s surrealistic landscape.
In addition to its physical transformations, ideologies, and narratives portray the desert through
Figure 1. Pre-Hispanic mining hammer from Chuquicamata, Chile (HP328). Source: Image courtesy of ROM (Royal Ontario
Museum), Toronto, Canada. ©ROM.

4 F. RIVERA AND D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC
negativity, as a barren and empty space defined by the notion of absence: the absence of the
Chilean State in a landscape dominated by private foreign mining companies or the supposed
absence of Indigenous peoples in a territory symbolically depopulated from its indigenous
communities by mining companies to exploit it. Therefore, the region is not a static or immutable
construct but a dynamic landscape of spatial and social differentiation engendered by the logic
of unequal economic development. This is the landscape seen by Zeller’s childlike eyes, in which
time, wild nature, and extractive spaces are imbricated.
‘From the higher part of the plateau on which our house was located, we could see in the distance various
volcanos; the ground on which we made the incursions of my childhood was totally covered with thou-
sands of stones that were called “the pavement of the desert” and are, actually, the leftovers of vast,
ancient, millenarian volcanic eruptions’ (Wald & Zeller, 1983, p. 18) (Figure 2).
To explore extractive logic, we use a collage of historical photographs, storytelling, and
Ludwig Zeller’s art and poetry to suggest surrealist juxtapositions. These juxtapositions show
how the Atacama is also an assemblage of different ways of thinking about the desert and
the role that scientific and artistic disciplines have played in shaping it. We thus highlight the
relationship between science and poetry in terms of the more specific recursive relationship
between ethnography and surrealism (Ades, Eder, & Speranza, 2012; Benjamin, 1978; MacClancy,
1995; Matthews, 1977; Tythacott, 2003). Clifford (1988) examined how they both emerged from
an interest in the exotic and the distant. By differentiating ethnography from the anthropo-
logical humanism of the early twentieth century, Clifford equated the transgressive position
of ethnography with the surrealist spirit as both reordering ancient cultures’ classification
systems: ‘[…] anthropological humanism begins with the different and renders it – through
naming, classifying, describing, interpreting – comprehensible. It familiarises. An ethnographic
surrealist practice, by contrast, attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness –
the unexpected’ (Clifford, 1988, p. 145). The archaeological understanding of Atacama’s
landscapes is located in that in-between space, where it begins with differences and under-
stands the past through naming, classifying, describing, and interpreting, but also provokes
the irruption of otherness and the unexpected. We agree that ‘surrealist procedures are always
present in ethnographic works, though seldom explicitly acknowledged’ (Clifford, 1988, p. 146),
Figure 2. Water extraction pipelines from the volcanos of the Atacama Desert. Photo: Isaiah Bauman from his 1913 expe-
dition. Source: Image courtesy of AGSL Digital Photo Archive: South America, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Libraries
Digital Collections.

LANDSCAPE RESEARCH 5
thus allowing us to use Zeller’s surrealist work to think about the desert, archaeology, and
extractivism from a flexible theoretical framework that challenges linear narratives and academic
conventions.
Ludwig Zeller was born in Rio Loa in 1927, an abandoned and ruinous town in Atacama.
Throughout his life, Zeller poetically explored the idea of the desert and the trajectory of agents
and materialities that shaped it. Zeller’s surrealist poetics and visual art offer exciting ways to
think about the past, memory, heritage, materiality, and landscapes (Flint, 2023). Zeller himself
participated in the collection of objects and mummified bodies from pre-Hispanic times that
still populate the desert, and that would lead him to think of his poetry in an almost archae-
ological way:
‘Unearthing pre-Columbian mummies’ he wrote, ‘I have seen that countries do not exist, that in the end
the earth grows between our teeth. If there is in me something essential in the fact that I am an
Hispano-American, for better or for worse, a voluntary exile from everything and everybody, it is that I can
return to my true centre, the solitude from which I have started’ (Wald & Zeller, 1983, p. 20) (Figure 3).
The anthropologist Michael Jackson pointed out that to think poetically is ‘a way of keeping
alive a sense of what it means to live in a world one struggles to understand rather than treat
that world as a text or abstract object of contemplation’ (Jackson, 2007, p. xii). Poetic thinking
thus helps imagine the world as an unfinished surrealist collage rather than a completed linear
narrative: ‘Sometimes images are juxtaposed that do not conventionally or logically belong
together […]. Poetic thinking is neither focused on one’s subjectivity nor the world’s objectivity
but on what emerges in the space between’ (Jackson, 2007, p. xii). It is this kind of in-between
space that, in this paper, we fill by juxtaposing scientific narratives, photographs, and Zeller’s
poetics and storytelling.
‘Let me reply to a question that is always being directed to me. I was born in 1927, in the desert of
Atacama, in the north of Chile. My poems and collages would be different from what they are today had
they grown out of any other environment, and had the surrealism that my work adheres totally to not
been that of one who thinks that we go on living, perhaps in a desert, where life is the mere flesh of a
mirage’ (Zeller, 1976, p. 129) (Figure 4).
Figure 3. Mummified animal bodies in the desert. Photo: Isaiah Bauman in his 1913 expedition. Source: Image courtesy
of AGSL Digital Photo Archive: South America, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Libraries Digital Collections.

6 F. RIVERA AND D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC
Madness: mirages in the Andes
We argue that scientific knowledge is another form of extractivism, a mechanism helping to
create and shape Atacama’s landscape. Let’s share a story. In 2002, the Chilean writer José
Miguel Varas published La Cuesta de la Paciencia (The Slope of Patience), a story about a Canadian
expedition led by the anthropologist Jean-Charles Folla in 1987 and that followed the route of
the ancient muleteers who led caravans of goods and cattle through the Atacama Desert.1 The
expedition comprised six people: Jean-Charles, two Chilean anthropologists, an Atacameño
muleteer, and a couple of Canadian archaeologists, who shall remain anonymous. Varas (1999,
p. 19) wrote: ‘He, we’ll call him Pierre, was too far from the norm. His wife, we will call her
Chantal, was angelic and beautiful’.2
For centuries, the activity of the muleteers helped maintain and reproduce the links histor-
ically created between different ethnic Andean communities, especially after Spanish colonialism
(Sanhueza, 1992). Their ghostly presence was still alive in the desert’s imagination during Zeller’s
childhood:
‘What does a child see in such a place? The marvels offered by reality and its ghosts: solitary prospectors
following their columns of mules crossing the mountains behind their chimera; dusty whirlwinds that
traverse like immense funnels the ravines of the desert where the nights are clear, and the stones break
up because of the cold’ (Wald & Zeller, 1983, p. 18) (Figure 5).
The goal of Folla’s expedition was very ambitious. His idea was to recreate, by mule, a seg-
ment of the route from the village of San Pedro de Atacama to Salta in Argentina, a journey
of at least ten days. The Atacama is rough and of lunar aridity, pointed out Varas, a strange
place for human life:
In the places where they arrived, there was no water to drink or wet their fingers. Not even the luxury
of a shower. During the day, under a cruel sun, difficult to imagine for those who have not felt it, the
temperature reached 25 or 30 degrees. At night, it could drop to 15 below zero (Varas, 1999, p. 19).
Varas is not the first, nor the last, to highlight the environmental conditions of the desert:
aridity, solar radiation, and temperature fluctuations form the picture of a world that is much
more than the backdrop of a human drama. In this sense, Atacama’s archaeological landscape
Figure 4. Left: Ludwig Zeller, The Meteor (Zeller, 1979), available at Memoria Chilena: https://www.memoriachilena.gob.
cl/602/w3-article-86080.html. Right: autoclave for processing sulphur (Griffith, 1933).

LANDSCAPE RESEARCH 7
is, in its own right, a research object: ‘the landscapes we see today should themselves be con-
sidered as an archaeological record as a whole (…) the more obvious “artifacts” produced by
human groups through time’ (Parcero-Oubiña, Criado-Boado, & Barreiro, 2020, p. 6422). The
Cuesta de la Paciencia is also a place that moves: ‘A plain-like infinity, which rises hour after
hour, by a barely perceptible slope, towards something that looks like a summit and that moves
away as it advances instead of approaching’ (Varas, 1999, p. 19). A similar conception of motion
and landscape can be found, for example, among Ngarinyin Aboriginal people in Australia,
where the anthropologist Anthony Redmond (2001) suggests that the environment is the pro-
tagonist, a non-human force determining human behaviour and social practices. In our case,
the arid and high altitude of this portion of Atacama influenced the behaviour of the members
of the expedition. It does so precisely by transmuting, diluting the very humanity of the char-
acters, leading them to a borderline experience in an extreme place. Varas (1999, p. 19) con-
tinues: ‘Pierre got the puna a few days later. This illness, or mountain sickness, is strange […].
It manifests with nausea, intense headaches, insomnia, high blood pressure, and panic attacks.
Sometimes, delusions’.
In a few lines, Varas highlights the consequences of being in this high-altitude landscape:
Atacama is a place that produces madness. In a fascinating book about the wanderings of the
missionary Émile Petitot in the Canadian Arctic, anthropologist Pierre Déléage recounts the
psychological transformations suffered by the priest under what twentieth-century ethnographic
and psychiatric literature called ‘Arctic hysteria,’ a sudden attack of madness and persecutory
mania. ‘He may have been the first Westerner to be infected with the attacks of mania typical
of Arctic hysteria or even the theomania of messianic movements’ (Déléage, 2020, p. 76). What
interests us here is Déléage’s reading of Petitot’s delirious episodes. For the author, ‘going mad
also meant going native.’ By this, he suggests that going mad is a form of incorporation and
confrontation with the landscape’s more-than-human agents. Perhaps the sickness called puna,
as a non-human force, is an agent of the high-altitude landscape that, as anthropologist Michael
Taussig (1997) would say, acts as a form of magical possession of the human body by another
kind of ‘body.’ In this case, the body of the desert.
Pierre began to feel strange symptoms; he was somehow possessed by the effects of the
madness produced by the desert.
He turned away from the group and began to walk hurriedly. He took out a towel, undressed, and lay
down to sunbathe. The others thought it was a bad joke. The muleteer, an Atacameño who understood
little Spanish and no jokes, was alarmed, went to look for him, and brought him back. They gave him pills.
Figure 5. Rock art in Purilacti, Chile. Source: Author.

8 F. RIVERA AND D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC
But the archaeologist did not get better; on the contrary, he got worse. He began to ask obsessively for
Coca-Cola. The situation became critical. […] The Atacameño muleteer gravely said it was necessary to
send him back […]. Pierre staggered, dirty, with red spots on his face and his hair tousled like a madman.
He would not listen to reason and rebelled against Jean Charles, the expedition leader (Varas, 1999, p. 19).
Fortunately, a passing-by truck agreed to take Pierre and Chantal back to San Pedro de
Atacama, where Liliana, one of the Chilean anthropologists, ‘left them installed in the hotel
with a swimming pool and first-world prices and returned the same day’ (Varas, 1999, p. 19).
After a few more days through steep slopes and endless trails, the expedition finally reached
its destination.
The story stands out for its simplicity but helps us understand Atacama’s surrealistic land-
scapes and the role played by archaeological imagination on the materials it seeks to compre-
hend. ‘The story is half fiction, half-truth,’ one of the protagonists recently told us. We are not
interested in assessing data objectivity but in recovering material traces that shape the imag-
ination of Atacama associated with aridity, solitude, and, of course, soroche or mountain sickness
(Rivera, 2022). Like an apacheta, an ancient marker on the muleteer’s routes, desert landscapes
are surrealistic collages of materials, anecdotes, and stories (Figure 6). Ludwig Zeller would
probably say that the story of the Canadian expedition is nothing more than one of life’s con-
tinuous mirages. Or, perhaps, another of the surreal images dreamt by the desert itself: ‘life is
perhaps a continuous mirage, and we can never wake up from it. It is necessary to fix these
images, to polish patiently the desires of the dreams’ (Wald & Zeller, 1983, pp. 19–20). Ultimately,
the story is about the human folly in the belief of the possibility of taming the desert landscape
and a severe critique of dubious scientific practice: ‘Jean Charles met Pierre and Chantal a few
years later at an international congress of archaeologists,’ wrote Varas. ‘He waved to them from
afar. They did not recognise him. He later learned that they had presented a highly praised
paper on the route of the muleteers through the Atacama’ (Varas, 1999, p. 19).
Figure 6. An ‘apacheta’ formed by a collage of rocks, animal remains, glass bottles, and metal containers. A form of ‘jux-
taposition—fortuitous or ironic collage’ (Clifford, 1988, p. 132). Huaytiquina, Chile. Source: Rodrigo Lorca.

LANDSCAPE RESEARCH 9
The epic: a racialized high-altitude landscape
The Industrial Revolution generated economic and social changes, and the colonisation of new
territories for productive purposes led humans to occupy previously unexploited environments,
such as deserts. Thus, industrial activities implied cultural, physiological, and psychological
adaptations in workers, who had to adapt to new habits, body movements, muscular activities,
and postures. The adaptations are even more extreme when individuals perform these new
work activities at high-altitude landscapes.
One of the highest inhabited sites on the planet was the sulphur camp of the Aucanquilcha
volcano (6176 m), located in the Ollagüe municipality in the Atacama highlands. Between 1913
and 1992, this was considered the highest active mining camp in the world, located at 5950m.
The remains of the camp and extraction areas, now abandoned at the volcanic landscape, bear
witness to this local mining activity, mainly carried out by indigenous workers from the Andean
highlands: ‘The Bolivian Indians, reared to such conditions, are the only people who can stand the
hardships’ wrote Herbert G. Officier, a contemporaneous American engineer (Officier, 1922, p. 996).
References to indigenous miners are fundamental to understanding sulphur mining in this locality
since a discourse was created that saw the indigenous Andean people as the only ones capable
of coping with the harsh conditions of working at high altitudes (Galaz-Mandakovic & Rivera, 2023).
The extreme conditions in which the miners at the Aucanquilcha volcano worked were unique
in the world, leading a group of U.S. scientists to study the effects of altitude on their health.
A group of researchers from Harvard University undertook a scientific expedition in 1935, called
the International High-Altitude Expedition (IHAE), to study human physiology in this work envi-
ronment (West, 1998). The main objective was the physiological study and understanding of
the capacity of adaptation for work in an environment paradoxically hostile to human life. One
of the scientific leaders of the IHAE was the physiologist David Bruce Dill, who was deeply
intrigued about altitude adaptation after reading about explorer Earl Hanson’s expedition to
Atacama (Hanson, 1926).
The expedition arrived at Ollagüe on June 5, 1935. Twenty days later, the group moved to
the Aucanquilcha volcano mining camp to study the workers’ physiological adaptations to
extreme altitudes and take measurements and blood tests (Keys, 1936). What motivated the
research group was the understanding that few people could live permanently above 5000 m,
even at the highest altitudes in the world, such as the Peruvian Andes or the Himalayas. However,
the researchers were surprised to learn that the miners lived at a much higher altitude than
anyone else. They worked in the mine at 5800 m, preferring to walk 500 m daily from the loading
station, which took about an hour and a half. Data was crucial for future researchers. It provided
valuable information for understanding the physiological effects of altitude on human health,
including blood pressure, cellular oxygen concentration, and heart rate (Talbott & Dill, 1936).
In addition, their data allowed physiologists to understand the impact of hypoxia on the central
nervous system, which can translate into reduced vision, hearing, coordination, short-term
memory, and focus. The expedition finally concluded that the limit for a human permanent
occupation was 5340 m (Keys, 1936).
The story of the expedition shows the problem of life and work at high altitudes from a
social perspective, allowing us to understand how mining development policies in the Atacama
have led to changes in the lifestyles of local communities. Viewing indigenous societies as
objects of study, laboratory, and experimentation, the scientific practice of IHAE members also
had significant economic and political consequences. While the expedition obtained essential
results on the human capacity to adapt to altitude and its effects on health, under the scientific
veil, it aimed to produce data for the interests of foreign companies that had invested heavily
in mining (Tracy, 2012).
The new living and working environments that accompanied industrialisation affected worker
performance. However, without information to measure actual impacts, mining companies could

10 F. RIVERA AND D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC
not expand. Thanks to the work of IHAE members, scientists were able to assess workers to
simultaneously study the effects of various physiological activities, such as circulation, respira-
tion, or changes in blood composition. As a result, ‘an integrated understanding of the normal
functioning of “normal men” in novel environments’ (Henderson, 1927) was within reach of
industry managers. Thus, companies used data on individual performance in extreme environ-
ments to evaluate their future investments, creating an essential link between economic moti-
vations and the scientific world. As science historian Sarah Tracy (2012) pointed out, under the
heading of ‘adaptation,’ physiologists expanded the social role of their field by contributing to
the knowledge of human capabilities, limitations, and needs, then used to guide socioeconomic
policies.
Although the scientists’ main objective was to understand the effects of altitude on human
physiology, they also highlighted another aspect of life on the Aucanquilcha volcano. Indeed,
in addition to altitude, sulphur miners faced harsh living conditions. These conditions configure
what we identify as the second narrative axis: the epic. Fifteen years after the IHAE, the American
engineer William Rudolph wrote that ‘without sign of discouragement, the hardy Chilean miner
has been battling wind and snow, altitudes above 17 000 feet and temperatures below zero,
precipitous Andean slopes and lack of transport, absence of water and scarcity of fuel’ (Rudolph,
1952, p. 562). For the author, ‘Men work at altitudes at which it was formerly believed that life,
human or any other, could not exist’ (Rudolph, 1952, p. 563). By studying the health of a group
of miners in the Chilean Andes, the IHAE marked a turning point with its contribution to the
knowledge of human capacities for adaptation to high altitudes.
Moreover, scientific studies on human physiology were closely linked to industry, as they
aimed to solve the problems arising from the new forms of industrial work. Mining companies
thus used the data provided by the expedition to justify working at altitude, paving the way
for the exploitation of natural and human resources in Latin America (Tracy, 2012). Although
sulphur miners had the physiological capacity to work at volcanic peaks, companies used the
high-altitude landscape imagery to racialise the indigenous peoples that inhabited them
(Galaz-Mandakovic & Rivera, 2023). Quechua and Aymara Indigenous workers in sulphur mining
at high altitudes were a form of subsidiarity, a subordinate workforce participating disadvanta-
geously in an asymmetrical economic relationship. Less than a negotiation, changes in the
livelihoods of local communities resulted from a political imposition. They conceal the violence
silenced by power relations, with medical research on physiological adaptation being just one
more of its forms. While Indigenous miners subsidised the expansion of capitalism in the region
with their bodies, the State and private companies used a specific figure of the Atacama desert
to channel their economic interests.
Sacrifice: a poem of suffering
Ludwig Zeller was not the only poet who knew about Atacama’s specificities and sang about
its mineral riches and social contradictions. Due to its extreme aridity, the Atacama has vast
areas of saltpetre, an optimal fertiliser for the world’s remote cultivated fields. The poet Pablo
Neruda lived far away from the desert, but he visited it and wrote about its minerals:
Saltpetre, flour of the full moon,
cereal of the calcined pampas,
foam of the rough sands,
jasmine tree of buried flowers.
Stardust sunk into the dark earth,

LANDSCAPE RESEARCH 11
snow of scorched solitudes,
knife with a snowy hilt,
the white rose of splashed blood3
(Neruda, 1971, p. 316)
There are multiple images in which Neruda portrays the desert; the structuring axis is the
imagination of danger, death, and the political violence of a bleak landscape. The word desert
is synonymous with desertion in its Latin root: desertus, deserere; that is, departure, abandon-
ment, oblivion. To live in the desert was to oppose the very etymology and ontology of the
territory. Therein lay the problematisation of the imaginary, aesthetics, and, undoubtedly, the
challenge for extractivism.
The sacrificial life of the mining desert stirred the poet, who visited the saltpetre mines
around 1945, at which time he observed the miners’ faces: ‘They are men with scorched features;
their solitude and the neglect they are consigned to have been fixed in the dark intensity of
their eyes’ (Neruda, 2021, p. 211). The poet described the bodily transformation produced by
extractivism in a calcining dry space; the eyes were the archive of loneliness and isolation, and
the burned faces were the sacrificial bodies of the ‘inhuman labour’ (Neruda, 2021, p. 211),
living in deplorable housing conditions. Like Zeller, Neruda describes a surrealistic mining
landscape:
Coming into those lowlands, facing those stretches of sand, is like visiting the moon. This region that
looks like an empty planet holds my country’s great wealth, but the white fertiliser and the red mineral
have to be extracted from the arid earth and the mountains of rock’ (Neruda, 2021, p. 211).
Capitalism values the desert for what it does not show superficially. The desert’s worth is in
what it hides. However, on the surface, the problematisation of existence comes into play. The
world of wealth was a world of poverty: ‘There are few places in the world where life is so
harsh and offers so little to live for. It takes untold sacrifices to transport water, to nurse a plant
that yields even the humblest flower, to raise a dog, a rabbit, a pig’ (Neruda, 2021, pp. 211–212).
This landscape dislocated Neruda’s autobiography: ‘I had a childhood filled with rain and snow.
Facing that lunar desert was a turning point in my life’ (Neruda, 2021, p. 212). He synthesised
how the desert transformed the biographies and the lives of migrant families, the labour nomads,
that arrived to work in those mining camps. The places and their silences built the image of
arcane secrets:
The naked earth, without a single plant, without a drop of water, is an immense, elusive enigma. In the
forests, alongside rivers, everything speaks to man. The desert, on the other hand, is uncommunicative. I
couldn’t understand its language: that is, its silence (Neruda, 2021, p. 212).
For the poet, those silences were vital dangers. The workers’ cries crossed the wasteland only
to find the echo of their voices. Their demands and petitions were unheard by mining managers
like Henry Sloman, a German who, using hunger, labour exploitation, biological sacrifice, and
paramilitary violence, built the Chilehaus in the Speicherstadt and Kontorhaus District of Hamburg
between 1922 and 1924. This enormous expressionist palace exhibits the immorality of a rich
man and the surplus value of workers’ labour. Today, the building is a World Heritage Site declared
by UNESCO in 2015, leading to sanitised narratives of the mining settlers’ past. On the other
side of the Atlantic, in the desert, only a big hole remains; the earth has been removed, and
the ruined walls of saltpetre extraction were left with their dead as archives of an erased society.
We borrow a phrase from Małgorzata Nieszczerzewska that describes them perfectly: ‘They do
not resemble an architectural work any longer, but begin to look like a specific, accidental,
surrealistic sculpture as a form that emerges due to a process of decay and collapse’
(Nieszczerzewska, 2015, p. 391). The sacrifice zone produces a profit zone, far away from the desert:

12 F. RIVERA AND D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC
‘Years later I saw abandoned nitrate mining towns where everything had been left intact: gigantic land-
scapes that De Chirico would have loved – and I understood his nostalgia, and also how different was
the feeling of things related to the American continent’ (Wald & Zeller, 1983, p. 18) (Figure 7).
The sacrifice zone is a place of danger, and the daily tasks were also detailed by Neruda:
The floor of the huge workshop was, as always, slushy with water, oil, and acids. The union leaders and I
walked on a plank that kept us off that mire. “These planks,” I was told, “cost us fifteen strikes in a row,
eight years of petitioning, and seven dead” (Neruda, 2021, p. 212).
Mining capitalism surrealistically counted and exchanged materials for human life. The infinite
plains of saltpetre knew of extreme violence and the bosses’ madness:
The deaths occurred when the company’s private police carried off seven leaders during a strike. The
guards rode horses, while the workers, bound with ropes, followed on foot over the lonely stretches of
sand. It took only a few shots to murder them. Their bodies were left lying in the desert sun and cold,
until they were picked up and buried by their fellow workers (Neruda, 2021, p. 212).
The Chilean poet describes flags greeting him in each of the mining camps. After settling
in a dormitory, a parade of people would begin with petitions and complaints about working
conditions. Knowing the vital complexities of saltpetre mining, the poet comments on delusions
in the petitions:
Sometimes their grievances were the kind a foreigner might consider comical, capricious, or even grotesque.
For instance, the shortage of tea could spark off a strike that would have serious consequences. Are typ-
ically British needs like that conceivable in such a desolate region? (Neruda, 2021, p. 214).
If the desert was valued for hidden minerals under its surface, the miner had to go down
to the big holes to extract its richness.
My reward is the momentous occasion when […] a man came up out of the tunnel into the full sunlight
on the fiery nitrate field, as if rising out of hell, his face disfigured by his terrible work, his eyes inflamed
by the dust, and stretching his rough hand out to me, […] he said to me, his eyes shining: “I have
known you for a long time, my brother.” That is the laurel crown for my poetry, that opening in the
bleak pampa from which a worker emerges who has been told often by the wind and the night and
the stars of Chile: “You’re not alone; there’s a poet whose thoughts are with you in your suffering”
(Neruda, 2021, p. 216).
The unlettered workers heard Neruda’s poetry; it was poetry for subterranean illiterates,
sacrificial bodies of a desert that, as Zeller imagined in the ‘The Aged Child Who Came from
the Depths,’ did not stop transforming itself nor its inhabitants:
Our dreams are woven by a wind from the other side of night,
The desert I'm always lost in, tracing the light of a mirage,
To find a way out under the fire of salt and disappointment (Zeller, 2007, p. 43).
Conclusions
The Atacama Desert, in its mere negativity, creates an image of a barren and empty space.
However, it offers, among other minerals, sulphur, and saltpetre, essential fungicides and nutri-
ents for agriculture, an indicator that defined the anachronic perspective of stages of cultural
evolution. Desert imaginaries represented by scientific expeditions challenged what Smith calls
the ‘temperate-normativity,’ a rigid conceptual framework that emphasises how ‘proper civilisa-
tions are said to arise from settlements in temperate locales that depend largely on cultivation
via agricultural practices’ (Smith, 2021, p. 159). The notion of emptiness is also challenged by
the Indigenous presence in the region. We borrow Domanska’s (2006) ‘non-absence’ to highlight
those ‘Others’ beyond the imaginary margins of the Chilean State in its quest for political and

LANDSCAPE RESEARCH 13
symbolic control of the desert. The extractive and ‘othering’ narratives constitute an ambiguous
and non-domesticated ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) of the desert and its anonymous and mar-
ginal inhabitants. The Atacameño arriero and the Aucanquilcha sulphur miners are examples of
Indigenous non-absence, one of the main research directions that we must further discuss
through the surrealist desert constitution.
Figure 7. A collage of a surrealist desert landscape. Top: The Prosperidad Saltpetre Camp founded by Henry Sloman in
1895. Postage stamps with the inscription: ‘Salitre significa prosperidad’ (1929). Grave in the Prosperidad cemetery with an
epitaph that portrays the actuality of the desert: ‘Silencio, polvo y olvido’ (Silence, Dust, and Oblivion). Roadside sign.
Fragments of newspapers. Workers’ shoes burned by the sun. Chilehaus building in Hamburg, Germany, built between 1922
and 1924 by Henry Sloman. Source: Author, except at the top by Martin Vega, used with permission, and bottom-right,
Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

14 F. RIVERA AND D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC
Through a collage of storytelling and photographs, we examined the Atacama Desert’s archae-
ological imagination and shed light on the role of little-known scientific and poetic expeditions
that shaped it. The surrealistic attitude towards the past is thus an enterprise of interpretation and
decoding, carried out in a situation of discontinuity, where vestiges and objects in our present are
not an image of the past but the result of the work of time on them (Olivier, 2008); a truly sur-
realistic practice. The Atacama carries the memory of past times and is thus a cultural reality
composed of ‘artificial codes, ideological identities, and objects susceptible to inventive recombi-
nation and juxtaposition’ (Clifford, 1988, p. 132). Talking about the Arctic, but easily transposable
to Atacama, the geographer Jen Rose Smith noted that ‘offering poetics as a counterpoint to
over-determined climate Science helps to reimagine an Arctic geography that is not circumscribed
to quantitative data alone but offers a vibrancy both discursive and material, human and more-than-
human’ (Smith, 2021, p. 160). The Atacama Desert is a massive and complex network of human
and more-than-human interactions (the puna, the sun, the volcano), a living, elusive landscape
assembled over time, which the modern scientific spirit sought to dominate.
Mining extractivism, scientific expeditions, and museum collections shed light on the role of
scientific practices and knowledge in configuring an extractive space and consolidating state power
in resource frontiers. This historical and political process frames the desert as a laboratory site for
modern science rather than a colonised place where the State and private mining companies sym-
bolically erased Indigenous people. Examining the notion of surrealistic landscape opens three main
research avenues: 1) Studying the archaeological genealogy of landscape imaginaries. 2) Exploring
archaeology’s transformative role within the material effects of capitalist expansion. 3) Considering
an alternative approach to understanding the entanglement of people, things, and places.
Using the surrealist notions of collage and juxtaposition, the exploration of three narrative axes
(madness, the epic, and sacrifice) through three microhistories (archaeological, scientific, and poetic)
offers us an alternative perspective to broaden the hermeneutics of a desert where mining
extractivism has constituted a sacrificial space, a hostile environment imposed by productivity
parameters. Each story reveals the hidden face of a subaltern territory whose environment and
local populations were sacrificed in the name of sovereignty (Varas), adaptation (IHEA), and prog-
ress (Neruda). Interpreting the desert landscape from this perspective enriches and complements
analyses of economics, politics, mining, engineering, or geology. From a surrealist approach,
unconscious and unpredictable pieces derived from extractivism are visible. Through a critical look
at the construction of archaeological landscapes, we place human and non-human subalterns at
the centre of the analysis, where narratives oscillate between the harsh reality of labour, the
configuration of dream worlds, and the surrealist delirium engendered by extractive capitalism.
To speak of deserts is to understand their dissonant complexity as material entities that put
in tension what Clifford (1988, p. 119) called normative cultural descriptions based on notions
of ‘beauty, truth, and reality’. By suggesting the idea of surrealistic landscapes, we juxtaposed
artificial dispositions to understand the Atacama Desert as a sacrificial space, a collage of mate-
rials shaped by mining companies, scientific explorers, archaeologists, collectors, and even poets
and artists: ‘One does not live just one but various existences, simultaneously’ wrote Ludwig
Zeller (Wald & Zeller, 1983, p. 19). So, too, Atacama is a multitude formed by ghostly existences,
surrealistic assemblages, and secret treasures scattered in a desertic landscape erroneously
deemed empty: ‘I've got two treasures, I told her. You will see them later. They’re secrets hidden
in the desert that cannot stay silent when the whirlwind is moving over the sand’ (Zeller, 1999,
p. 143).
Notes
1. Folla published part of his fieldwork in Atacama as a thesis at the University of Montreal (Folla, 1990).
2. Varas’s story was freely translated by the authors.
3. Our translation.

LANDSCAPE RESEARCH 15
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Beatriz Hausner, Arni Brownstone, Justin Jennings, Tiziana Gallo, the editors, and anonymous
reviewers for their insightful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (FONDECYT, ANID Chile)
[grant number 11220113].
Notes on contributors
Francisco Rivera is a historical archaeologist and received his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of
Montreal, Canada. His research interests are the archaeology of the contemporary past, industrial heritage,
and the historical archaeology of capitalism both in the Atacama Desert and Quebec’s Lower North
Shore, Canada.
Damir Galaz-Mandakovic is a historian and received his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the Universidad Católica del
Norte (Chile) and his Ph.D. in History at the Université Rennes 2 (France). His research focuses on the history of
mining in the Atacama Desert and southwestern Bolivia.
ORCID
Francisco Rivera http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4938-7392
Damir Galaz-Mandakovic http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0312-6672
Data availability statement
No data is available.
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