 We're very fortunate to have a guest lecturer from Chinayit today, Professor Komotaro-San Koro from the University of Patapakaha and the Dika's visiting us. I think we're fortunate to be visiting him in the last summer. How can we see him in the next year? Professor Sintoro received his MA in Archaeology at Corleone University and his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh. He's done research and sensitive publication on everything from the archaic period in Northern Chile to the Inca period. He was also the editor of Trinidad, a well regarded journal in South American archaeology for many years. So, thank you, Professor Sintoro. Thank you, Nicolas. I need to look at her first. Good. Well, first, it is a pleasure to be here today, not tonight, even though... So, my presentation should be called also the good, the bad and the ugly in the history of the Atacama Desert, and I will explain why. And I'm trying to avoid the expression or this division, this sort of false division between prehistory and history. And I'm inspired by this recent book by Clay Gamble, which is called Looking at the Deep History of Humankind. And I think he said that when we divide this prehistory and history, it's sort of a very false dichotomy. And I think the way that I'm going to present the human history in the Atacama Desert is a good example that this division is very artificial. So, and I will explain why I'm talking about the good, the bad, the second good and the second ugly. That's in term of the ecological condition of the Atacama in the last 17,000 years since the people arrived in these landscapes. And so, I was in Orlando in the SAA meeting last week, and I had to comment one of the symposium. And when I was doing that, I finished my comments by saying that in 1987, Luis Binford, in another SAA meeting in Toronto, he was reviewing two days of papers about people moving by the end of the Plato scene early on the Holocene. And so, one of his fine remarks was that the only thing that stops people to move in or out is water. So, meaning that snow, high temperature, epoxy, whatever, it doesn't stop people. The only thing that stops human society is when water comes out of the landscape. So, that's the reason because I'm talking about good times, bad times, and ugly times, because the ugly times is a combination of both things. Okay, it's a combination of bad environment but also bad way of people dealing with this environment. So, just to show you where this Atacama Desert is located, those are examples of other areas in the planet. And so, we know that this is the driest place in Earth because there is almost zero rainfall in this area today. And it has been that way for millions of years. It's not a consequence of the last 10 or 20,000 years. It's a very old process that has been related with this landscape in South America. So, particularly our research work is in this area that is sort of inland basin close to the Pacific Coast, which is over here, and the Andes. So, in this case, and that sounds very interesting for the Atacama Desert. When people go there, they see that there are vegetation along the valleys, there are vegetation in this inland basin. So, say, well, how can you say that this is the desert when you have all this vegetation and all this farming activity? But the problem is, all depend of the rainfall here. And rainfall has been dramatically changed through time in the last 17,000 years. So, when there is rain up here, the whole history down the slope is different. When the rain decreases here, things change through the Pacific too. So, it is this variation through time that we are now studying with the paleocologists, you know, including Ron here and Marco. And in order to see how the landscape or the environment was changed and provide opportunity for society to live there, I always talk about this and some of my colleagues said, well, you are a geographic determinist archaeology, you know, but I don't care. That's the way we are doing our research, you know, and probably I'm wrong, but that's the way that we are doing things, you know. So, if you look at the map, you will see that there are some vegetation here that is provoked by this coastal fog locally called Kamanchaka. And I will talk about this later. And all the vegetation that is related with the rainfall here in the high Andes. So, we are talking about 3,000 meters above sea level and about 1,000 meters above sea level here. So, in between we have this, what we call the core of the Takama Desert with no water, with no rain, with nothing at all, but with some period of some riparian and spring water coming through. And those conditions provoke the possibility for human society to live there. This is a typical epoch when there are some rain coming from the highlands. And so, it's in dates the whole scenario there, you know, and this is a picture that I took about 10 years ago, just on the high, on the Pan-American highway, and it was just probably, probably was a rain in summer time. So, let me tell you something. The rainfall in this area is about 300 millimeter per year, which is almost nothing. You know that in California, I think that's the minimum you have here. In the Kalahari, for instance, you have between 900 millimeter to about 350 millimeter. In the Namibia, it's the same thing. In the Australian desert, it is the same thing. You have rains in those deserts, but here, no. So, these are the ugly and the bad periods, you know. We're talking about this late price-to-scene epoch with two main periods of rain that are called the Central Ande period, Pluvial event one and Central Ande and Pluvial event two. Most of the archaeological sites in the Atacama are located within, related with this period, where still don't know what happened here. We have the impression, our hypothesis, that people arrived here just about 14 or 16,000 years ago, or maybe even earlier, if we accept and agree with the last radiocarbon dated by Tom Dilehi in Monte Verde. He just published a new data, which is about 18,000 years ago, meaning that probably people were living here, too. And so, then we have a very dry period with the archaeological silence that have been told, said by Lautaronuñas, then we have another Pluvial phase. This is the second good period, and then we have the last dry phase, which is related with this ugly period, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Probably you remember that movie. So, again, these are the periodicity of this Pluvial event, and this is how the landscape look today. Can you see those plants remains there? Well, we have been dating that, and those are between 17,000 and 10,000 years ago. It is amazing. It is incredible that when you walk there, you cannot believe that those plants remains, leaves, shrubs, and trunks, are there since about 17,000 and even earlier. So, this is Eugenia Gallo, one of the authors of this research. She's in the Napa Valley now. And so, these are our records for this previous time. So, most of our archaeological records are located over this period of time. We have some archaeological record over here that still we are taking with caution, in order not to jeopardize our project. And so, until now, we have four archaeological sites related with this early human occupation in the Atacama Desert. This was the first one that we found about four years ago. But then we have this outcrop, little quarry, with one site related with this quarry. We have this huge area here, which seems to be a hunting area. We have a camp, and now, in January, we found another camp here. And these are about 20 to 25 kilometers in an area. So, it's a very close area for people to live. And I will tell you what happened there. So, once again, those are also sites that we have been looking for. Most of these sites are paleo-ecological sites. We date that showed that there was water and vegetation there. But in all of the cases, we found archaeological sites associated. So, we still don't know if this is the consequence that people didn't select those particular paces, or if it's a problem of conservation, probably a flood, watched out some of the archaeological sites. So, most of the early sites are located over this terrace number one. The geologists of the program are calling this Jason Rech from the Miami University. So, this is an old flood plain, which is called the terrace 2.5. And most of the second period is located here. I will show you later. So, this is against the landscape today. And probably, in those days, there was vegetation like this, and there was plenty of these kinds of animals. Camelids, and vicuña, and guanaco, and more rodent like this catch, and things like that. So, this is the typical terrace number one. And this is a myosin terrace. This was the plain that was carved by the late Pleistocene activity, you know, that was cutting this plain, and this is sort of a remnant of that erosion. I think I have another. Yeah, here we are. You know, we planted these trees last night, you know. So, these are the species that we already have identified. This one, big apabones, ascalonia and exetum, they need water. These are not desert plants. If there is no running water, you cannot have them. Actually, you can find these trees anywhere in this area today. The only one that can grow if there is some groundwater underneath is this genus molle. And here, one of these trees, this is a real tree that we found there. It's a prosopis tamarugo. You know, prosopis tamarugo, the way that it works, it goes first down until they get the groundwater, then they go up. And it's perfect because here, we are about five meters from the actual flat plain of that epoch. So, probably, we think that probably this plain here, where the camp is located, these are not false people. These are the archaeologists doing the fieldwork here. So, it was vegetative. It was shaded by trees. So, this was a completely different landscape, 12 or 13,000 years ago. This is once again a drawing that there was one with the early occupation and then the later phase of this landscape with the later occupation that I will explain later. This is just the high terrace with the archaeological site and all this flat plain, this later flat plain that was eroded during the Pleistocene. All these green dots are archaeological, these are lithic events. The main area of the occupation is here. This part of this terrace is higher than this one here. And from here, you have a nice view of the landscape. As I show here, you see, when you are standing here, you can see the Andes and also you can see to the coastal Cordillera. The Andes is about 80 kilometers to the east and the Pacific is about another 80 kilometers. So, why people selected this site? Because it was a very nice note to connect with this outside world, but also it was plenty of resources like this. So, it was a sort of a gold field, you know, green and with a lot of vegetation and animals and so on. So, we did some excavation and so we found what we call this prepare-herd with this vertical clasp and some wooden sticks and other sticks that have been identified around here. We have now almost 20 meters of excavation and because of the conservation there, we have all the artifacts that were produced during this time are preserved, including the threads made out of carbonate fiber. But we know now that they were managing carbonate fiber, plant fiber and also leather. So, they were collecting these nasarius gajie little shells and we know that they were making a hole there. Yes, there are several of these probably to make a necklace or something like that. We have this plant fiber covered with these three pigments and bone artifacts and lithic artifacts and so on and so on. These people were very knowledgeable in managing different raw material and in managing the local resources as well as outside resources, including obsidian from the highland. This is the only piece of obsidian that Nico have checked. You know that we know where this is coming from. It's not coming from Bolivia as Jose Capil wanted to be. But it's really far away. It is about 500 kilometers. This obsidian was brought from about 300 to 400 kilometers to the northeast. No, this is from the visibility area. It is amazing because Luis Borreto thinks the opposite. No, not Luis Borreto. Carlos Vazquero we have been discussing about how people managed their environment and he thinks that people were most of the time settling in one particular area without moving much outside the larger landscape. But I think people were moving a lot during this time. This is just the same example that we saw before with the different artifacts associated with this site. This is the outcrop of Chayacoyo. We have more than around 1,000 red dots. Again, this event with raw material coming from this outcrop but also raw material that was brought to this area. So they transformed this as a huge workshop in order to produce different artifacts or to produce these bifacial artifacts that they moved out to different places within the area and outside the area too. This is one of the excavations in the Chippana site. Look at the dating. We have this date that is 14,000. These are not calibrated. So this probably is about 16,000 to 17,000 years ago. But look, it's close to this other date here. This is a tweak. So look at the plus and minus, it's 680. So that's the problem that we have with these old dates. They have this problem because most of them are within around 10,000 years ago. These are the same camp. This is the Pampalta Monocled Basin. So this was one of the ravines that were getting into this basin. So people was camping here. This is the outcrop. So we know that... I'm going to go back again. On the surface, we found a concolepa chao. So that was the last meal that they have there. And it is about 9,000 years ago, the date of that. And that was the end of the story. There is no more activity in that area. So this is Pampa Ramadita. Again, all these light areas are a recent flood. So if you walk here, you will see that there are some surfers in a higher position. And it is in those higher areas where people place their camp. And we have now about 7 hectares off site. Plenty of these arrowheads and knives and scrapers. But no... This is a new kind of type that people from Uruguay think that this recently, especially this one, this one, this one resembles the El Tigre kind of arrowhead that have been found and defined for Uruguay. So we need to look at the typology of that. But this is Jose Capriles' point because he is saying that this kind of rock is not local. I think he's right. He was brought from Bolivia and that's around his side. So he's happy that at least in those days the Bolivians were going down to Chile. He has now a historical fundament to claim, to support the claim for them. So this is the Cueva Autista where he has been working for the last two years. This is about... there are 500 kilometers from the coast and about 300 kilometers from Cuevalada Maní. So this rock is coming from somewhere over here. So once again, we think that in those days people were managing local landscape and outside landscape too. So these are the four sites that we have now related with all the sites that we already know for the 4,000 Peru. These are around here at Iquipa and Copiapós and we're over here. So there are not many sites. And the only thing that we have been looking now is that most of the sites, the early sites are just one single site within the South American map. So with one single site it is hard to understand the settlement pattern. So that's the reason because instead of looking for a larger territory we have concentrated a very narrow or small territory in order to see different ways of using this space and try to understand how people manage their resources and their history there. So here is what happened about 10,000 years ago. We will get into the first bad period because there is a true added period between 10,000 to 10,000 years ago from about 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. And it's varied depending where you are located in the map. But in the Coros de Atacama there were at least 5,000 or 6,000 years without water. So the condition that we have here completely disappeared over this period of time. So we have what we call sort of collapse. And so there are two major shifts in this historical process. People move to the coast. It doesn't mean that there was no people before that. But we got the impression that the coast started to be used more intensively as well as the highlands. Most of the archaeological sites in the highlands are dated about 10 to 11,000 years ago. Where aboutista is contemporaneous with the site in the Mani area. But most of the sites that we have here are about 10,000 years ago before present. If you have any question, please stop. And I can work with that. This is just entering in the second period here between 2,500 to 1,300 before present. Once again the paleoacologists know that there was an increase in the rainfall in the highlands. So the whole riparian and the paleo wetlands were recuperated again. And so people went back to the call of the Atacama. And all of the archaeological sites have been found along the way. But when they went back, they keep doing hunting and gathering. But they added farming. And that produced a major change in their history. This is just again a reproduction of the same periodicity. And all the data that we have for this period here, for this pluvial event here. Going back to the Pampal Tamarugal Basin. All of these kebraditas or ravines that end in the Pampal Tamarugal Basin we have found little bleaches. I don't know if you can see. There is one here, Pirkas, and there is another one here. In an environment that is completely arid today, hyper arid. In those days probably there were the same trees that I mentioned for the first epoch, especially Prosopis Tamarugos. There is an issue about Prosopis Tamarugos that I'm not going to mention now. So this is a close-up of one of these Pirkas early formative sites. And this is a detail of that site. This is the other site that is across the ravine. And it's called Cacerones. It has a wall that was made about 880. And so these are just the studies that have been done by Mauricio Rive and his team. Another picture of the same area. This is about two hectares site. The tail of the walls is very well preserved and is full of different activities. And then we have another site. It's called Aldea Guatacondo. They put it in an area where there is a pampa here. There is this cut that was produced by this ravine. And then so you have another high terrace. So it's well protected. And you have a very nice view of the landscape. And it has this huge plaza with the central manure here. And so it's all the same epoch. And this is Ramadita, another site with the same time in the same landscape. And the tail of the constructions. They were very well done. These were not villages that were used for a short period of time. People built their villages there. And they stayed there for several days and several years. These are the conservation of these posts that are prosopis trees. Different details. And all these green areas are the farming land that require artificial irrigation. You cannot have farming here if you don't get water from all these ravines. And you have to put that water into canals and to spread it over the landscape. And it has been calculated that there are around 400 hectares here of land transformation for farming. These are some of the products they kept collecting agarro, which is our prosopis. Which in some way or another was the staple. They have corn. They have these are the seeds. They produce several things and they collect it from the local landscape. But also they need to bring shellfish and fish in order to feed the whole population here. They couldn't stop managing the hunting and gathering world. It is impossible for them. And I think this was a tricky thing for them to understand. That the only way to maintain their society there was by bringing things from outside. As we do today. Most of the minor towns in northern Chile are supported by things that are brought from outside. And this is the work that we are doing in this broken peanut kebrada, the prekebrada mani. You can see once again the farming land with all these canals. They were really masters in managing the water. They got the water from in the higher position in the kebrada. And they moved the water down. They used the natural channels. They connected the natural channels plus their own channels. So once again we have 200 kilometers here of channels and farming land that were used for about 1,000 years during the same epoch. These are the work that is done by our colleagues, the paleocologists. These are examples of this farming. And these are also part of the transformation of the landscape to do the farming. You can see this canal in Google. Actually you can follow them from the mouth of these kebradas going into the pampal tamarugal. Once again there are hundreds of kilometers. All of them will be hundreds of kilometers of canal and farming land under cultivation during this time. Including Adam, this one. Which is 750 millimeters square meter. But you know it is interesting because there are canals that are getting from here in order to get the water from here. But also during a good period of time they go with the canal outside of the dam. So they manage the two things. It is amazing how they know how to use the water and how to manage the water. These are just examples of the canal going down the stream. And you can see the farming area there. And in this case we don't have a concentrated town. We don't have what we saw before. So the way that they map their village all over this landscape. So we have concentration of two or four or five domestic areas. And then more farming. So they were sort of living between the farming areas. And we found this shark teeth and this copper mineral made out of a pendant. This is the T1, the old T1. And you know it is interesting. There is no activity of the farmers in the T1 terrace. They look and they want it to settle over here. And I think probably they didn't want to be seen from far away. Because probably this was one way to keep and to be safe. In early time I think it was the opposite. Few people in the whole landscape you need to be seen in order to get connected with other people that was moving around. But in this case most of this site is embedded in this sort of internal landscape. This is just another little dam with this rock art there. So there is always this connection that people are doing economic things on one hand. But simultaneously they are having this sort of sense given activities by marking the rocks with this rock art. This is another detail of the canal. We walk this canal and we have radiocarbon dating. So we know that they are pretty well dated. And this is part of the tools that were used for farming. We know that there have been some microscopic analysis of the reservoir over here. And so we know that they were using llama dung as a fertilizer because there are some organic material that is part of the llama dung. So they were fertilizing the land too. And besides farming and creating all this landscape they also were marking the landscape with these figures. And we think that this is a very old figure that is called Encelo Onitas. And the color, if you get the...