Agro-pastoral plots and practices in Ambato Valley, Catamarca (VI-XI AD)

Abstract

Recent investigations have led to argue that in the Ambato Valley, Catamarca, between the sixth and tenth centuries AD, the existence of a network of productive practices that simultaneously included and ar-ticulated plant and camelid breeding practices in the same space and with the same infrastructure, was sha-ped as a single agro-pastoral practice of animal, vegetable, and fodder production. This economic practice merged into a single web of relationships different ways of doing until then hold as autonomous economic strategies with independent historical trajectories, articulating in a mutualistic logic the production of plants and animals for consumption (human and animal). The proposal is based on the analysis and interpretation of multiple dimensions of the local record, such as anatomical and taxonomic identifications, osteometry and stable isotope analysis and other lines of inquiry and analysis of microfossils (silicophytolits, starches, etc.) chemical studies of soil (phosphorus, organic matter, pH), radiocarbon dating, spatial analysis and experimental archaeology, along with the application of frameworks and ethnoarchaeological models.