Late Holocene landscape changes in a western Catamarca Valley: integrating archaeology, palinology and geomorphology

Abstract

The El Bolsón Valley (Belén, Catamarca Province) is located between two geographical and cultural areas of great interest for the region’s (Northwest Argentina - NOA) archaeology. Given its location – helmed by the Puna and the lower valleys – it constitutes an ideal place in which to study environmental changes at a local scale, elucidating its relationship with known paleoenvironmental sequences of the wider NOA region. Studies on fossilized pollen extracted from a Laguna Cotagua sedimentary sequence, identified changes in local vegetation dating to 5581 ± 40 years BP. Sedimentology studies of these sequences, as well as others from fluvial terraces containing archaeological material, show abrupt geomorphological changes in the valley from ca. 3,000 years BP, onwards. Geoarchaeological studies on these records, contributed data that allowed us to chronologically arrange sediment erosion and deposition events that impacted on the local Prehispanic population’s life-ways and settlement of the valley. The aim of this article is to integrate this data, with the available archaeological information, thereby contributing to the corpus of paleoenvironmental data for the NOA region.