The structuration of hunting landscape: Interrelations between people and Vicuñas in the area of the salar de Antofalla, Catamarca province, Argentina
Abstract
Vicuñas have been a relevant resource in the economy of humanpopulations of the Andes for 10.000 years ago until now. However, the
way these animals were trapped continues being up to this moment a very
poorly explored question in specialized literature. This can be explained
due to the fact that the interaction between humans and vicuñas does not
simply reduce to the control of the first ones, but that the second ones also
impose their decisions and behaviors complicating hunting’s possibilities.
Besides, space and technology also play a relevant role in this relation.
That is why hunting of vicuñas must be comprehended as a sustained net of relations in which these phenomena were sustained in the Puna
de Atacama. But now, yet, how can we analyze these manifestations
from archaeology? One of the richest options in order to deal this social
fact is the landscape, due that it is structured, organized, prepared by
hunters to achieve the appropriation of this resource. Also, this landscape
is demarcated by the vicuñas, for example through the paths they use
repeatedly and which are they ways to escape in case they find themselves
corralled. In this paper we try to show some of the traces of the structure
of this landscape in the area of the Salar de Antofalla, Dpto. Antofagasta
de la Sierra, Catamarca Province, Argentina, analyzing their relation
with hunting activities and proposing some categories of relevant
analysis in order to discuss these issues. Considering the landscape as
a grouping of relations between different factors which take place in
the development of everyday life, the methodology we have developed in
order to carry forward this investigation is based on the systematization
of the information of intensive surveys of the Antofalla valley, generating
a model of the space in which the zones exploited by hunters in order to
trap vicuñas are marked and explaining how this processes could have
been. In this connection, the topography, the resources, the archaeological
evidences and the areas where vicuñas move daily are taken into account.
