The First Inhabitants of the Atacama Desert: The Beginning of a long-term Human Enterprise in an Extreme Environment
A Lecture delivered on April 12 2016, 12-1 p.m., At the Archaeological Research Facility, UC Berkeley
Speaker: Calogero Santoro, Professor, Instituto de Alta Investigación, Universidad de Tarapacá, Arica, Chile
Sponsor: Archaeological Research Facility

By at least 13,000 years ago, highly knowledgeable human groups colonized the Atacama Desert and survived under changeable hyper-arid conditions. Our collaborative research has recovered fragments of this cultural process revealing how prehistoric peoples organized their cultural systems in a dynamic environment characterized by wetlands and riparian woodlands as ground and surface water permanently flowed in abundance from the high Andes to the Pacific coast. In these scenarios hunter-gatherers build socio-natural landscapes, with very low population density social groups with a hunting and gathering way of life. This bonanza declined around 9,000 years ago and as people did not have adequate technological response to cope with the reduction of resources, they moved to the coast and the Andes. Around 2,500 years ago a new although less abundant hydrological cycle reactivated the Atacama Desert ecosystem demanding more complex technological solutions. By the 18th century it was necessary to drill the earth to get underground water for a constant encasing demand. Nowadays, these technological systems have been taken to the extreme to supply the high demand of water for farming, mining, urban and rural expansions.
Calogero M. Santoro is Professor of Archaeology at the Instituto de Alta Investigación, Universidad de Tarapacá in Arica, Chile. He is former editor of Chungara Revista de Antropología Chilena. He received his MA in archaeology at Cornell University and his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh. He has taught courses on South American Prehistory, Archaeology, as well as Peoples and Cultures of World Prehistory and has done archaeological research along the dry valleys, the Pacific coast, and the highland of northern Chile for over 35 years.
*Note: Apologies for this video ending early about 35 minutes into a 45 minute presentation.*

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