"Those who walk". A Calchaquí narrative event valued from archeology and ethnohistory

Abstract

The Late rock art recorded in the Quillivil cave, located in the Calchaquíes Valleys, in the Argentine Northwest, exhibits a series of rows of painted human figures, walking in one direction or another. These figures wear decorated garb and important headdresses suggesting that they are elite characters. Who are these characters and what was their destiny? To try to answer these questions, I adopted, as a methodology, a narrative perspective based on the passage of actors through different media; that is, identifying similar pilgrimages in other sites with art or in archaeological pieces of the region. These changes of scenery are forming the thread of a narrative and the comparisons facilitate the identification of the trappings and objects present in the paintings. This information, added to that from Andean ethnohistoric sources -local and regional- allows formulating hypotheses about the event that is portrayed.