This article focuses on the architectural characteristics of a household compound in Cardonal, an early agricultural village located in the southern Cajón Valley (Catamarca, north-western Argentina) dated to the first centuries ad. When architecture, as landscape, is understood as the result of the daily tasks of living, the research carried out in Cardonal gives substance to the ways in which the materiality of everyday life forged the building of this prehistoric village. Cardonal is an example of how houses and architecture are not static but fluidly changing with the contingencies of life.

The circulation and exchange of goods and resources at various scales have long been considered central to the understanding of complex societies, and the Andes have provided a fertile ground for investigating this process. However, long-standing archaeological emphasis on typological analysis, although helpful to hypothesize the direction of contacts, has left important aspects of ancient exchange open to speculation. To improve understanding of ancient exchange practices and their potential role in structuring alliances, we examine material exchanges in northwest Argentina (part of the south-central Andes) during 400 BC to AD 1000 (part of the regional Formative Period), with a multianalytical approach (petrography, instrumental neutron activation analysis, laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry) to artifacts previously studied separately. We assess the standard centralized model of interaction vs. a decentralized model through the largest provenance database available to date in the region. The results show: (i) intervalley heterogeneity of clays and fabrics for ordinary wares; (ii) intervalley homogeneity of clays and fabrics for a wide range of decorated wares (e.g., painted Ciénaga); (iii) selective circulation of two distinct polychrome wares (Vaquerías and Condorhuasi); (iv) generalized access to obsidian from one major source and various minor sources; and (v) selective circulation of volcanic rock tools from a single source. These trends reflect the multiple and conflicting demands experienced by people in small-scale societies, which may be difficult to capitalize by aspiring elites. The study undermines centralized narratives of exchange for this period, offering a new platform for understanding ancient exchange based on actual material transfers, both in the Andes and beyond.

This article explores the past as a lived, inhabited reality through a series of examples of indigenous heritage practices in NW Argentina (NWA), a region that in recent decades has seen increasing indigenous demands for autonomy as well as for land and cultural rights. This article seeks to understand the locations where heritage struggles emerge, as well as the artefacts around which they emerge, as social, semantic, and physical spaces of ontological multiplicity. Understanding how such places and artefacts are constituted as lived-in-the-flesh realities today requires examination of the multiple present connections that make them possible, as well as inquiry into how the sedimentation of previous lived experiences contributes to present understandings. This article examines ancient places that become gravity points, fuelling both indigenous politics and an academic practice with its own aesthetic code. To varying degrees, the cases explored reflect our involvement – as archaeological researchers, professional advisors, and museum visitors – with re-emergent indigenous heritage practices in the region.

Drawing on the contrasting but mutually informative realities of present-day heritage politics of Argentina and Australia, this article explores the links between different cultural practices of preserving artefacts and the lived experience of the landscape. Central to the argument is that such a domain constitutes a specific form of materiality, a diverse field where social significance arises from a long process of entanglement of people with a lived landscape and the many transactions and durations that shaped it. This is explored through artefacts designed to contain ‘uncomfortable objects’, whose ownership cannot be easily located under Western law. Their second life as heritage results in ambiguous locations and valuations as these artefacts question the legitimacy of the available legal and cultural frameworks for their transferability. Together, the uncomfortable objects and the artefacts that contain them tangibly intervene in contemporary projects and concretize ‘past/present systems’, forming an empirical object constituted by mutually dependent terms of equal importance. Building upon conversations, observations and participation in community activities in both countries, the article argues for incorporating present-day encounters into the heart of archaeological analysis. The article follows the current search for hybrid methodologies to examine the contemporary settings of archaeological practice, yet it does so by insisting that the past is irreducible to present experiences.

It is argued here that the desire to make things visible that under-writes archaeological research is an effect of the Western split between subject and object. This conforms a matrix of `optic knowledge', or the totalizing gaze of an all-knowing subject, that infuses our language and practices with visual metaphors. The critical consideration of visual metaphors is particularly relevant for gender studies in archaeology and their desire to make women visible. However, this desire also enables the re-signification of vision as a connected experience within a field of social and material forces, thus exposing gender, or any other aspect of social difference, as part of a field of relational practices.