The relations between humans and animals extend into socio-cultural aspects that go beyond the mere acquisition of food, meaning that animals constitute cultural resources that fulfill diverse roles in social and cultural systems. Visual images in different media, including rock art, represent one of the ways in which these complex relationships take place. While in the New World few comparative analyses of archaeofaunal and visual data have been addressed, in the Old World these studies have been framed by a dichotomist view between drawn (thought) and consumed (eaten) understanding, both terms as separate and disconnected social realms. This view also structures an abstract, non-pragmatic, rather passive, world drawn in art, against a concrete, practical, active world of consumption. The analysis we present here, based on principles of substantive economy theory, explores the relation between humans and animals in the prehistory of the Atacama Desert (ca. 13,000–410BP), by comparing visual images of fauna depicted in rock art (engravings and paintings) with archaeofaunal remains from domestic and funerary contexts. The dataset (comprised of 1534 archaeofaunal items and 729 rock art animal motifs from 117 sites) was standardized by calculating the percentage of ubiquity of each animal item per period of time, using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients to identify synchronic and diachronic changes in the relative importance of certain animals consumed. We observed important temporal and contextual variations in the consumption of animals drawn in rock art in the Atacama Desert, and we conclude that they reflect a selection of a wide range of ritual and utilitarian, but not mutually exclusive, functions. In particular, images of camelids emphasized the importance of providing fiber for the creation of textile artifacts and camelid use as pack animals in the caravan trade, both activities that were fundamental in the economy of local societies

Management of camelids in the coastal valleys of the Andes has generated much debate in recent years. Zooarchaeological and isotopic studies have demonstrated that in the coastal valleys of northern and southern Peru there were locally maintained camelid herds. Because of the hyperarid conditions of the northern coast of Chile, this region has been assumed to be unsuitable for the raising of camelids. In this study we report stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic compositions of camelid bone collagen and textiles made from camelid fiber from Late Intermediate Period (LIP) and Late Horizon (LH) occupations in northern Chilean river valleys. The camelid bone collagen isotopic compositions are consistent with these animals originating in the highlands, although there is a significant difference in the camelids dating to the LIP and LH, possibly because of changes made to distribution and exchange networks by the Inca in the LH. There were no differences between the isotopic compositions of the camelid fibers sampled from textiles in the LIP and LH, suggesting that either the production of camelid fiber was unchanged by the Inca or the changes that were made do not present visible isotopic evidence. Several camelid fiber samples from both the LIP and LH present very high δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N values, comparable to human hair samples from one site (Huancarane) in the Camarones Valley. These data suggest that people in the northern valleys of Chile may have kept small numbers of animals specifically for fiber production. Overall, however, the vast majority of the textile samples have isotopic compositions that are consistent with an origin in the highlands. These data suggest that the hyperarid coastal river valleys of northern Chile did not support substantial camelid herds as has been interpreted for northern Peru.

Results of exploratory in situ analyses with a portable X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) applied to six rock painting sites, located from Lluta to Camarones coastal valleys in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile, are presented. The results indicate the use of iron oxide as a main component in all paintings, alone or combined with aluminum silicate. Arsenic, a component highly present in water in the region, was also identified, indicating the use of water as a possible binder or thinner. These output allow unraveling painting technology, a step forward to define and understand the stylistic variability of rock art (engravings and paintings) in the context of the social changes and continuities of prehistoric communities. Additionally, it illustrates the effectiveness of portable XRF, a non-destructive analytical tool, applied for the first time in the Atacama Desert.

Manioc—also called cassava and yuca—is among the world’s most important crops, originating in South America in the early Holocene. Domestication for its starchy roots involved a near-total shift from sexual to clonal propagation, and almost all manioc worldwide is now grown from stem cuttings. In this work, we analyze 573 new and published genomes, focusing on traditional varieties from the Americas and wild relatives from herbaria, to reveal the effects of this shift to clonality. We observe kinship over large distances, maintenance of high genetic diversity, intergenerational heterozygosity enrichment, and genomic mosaics of identity-by-descent haploblocks that connect all manioc worldwide. Interviews with Indigenous traditional farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado illuminate how traditional management strategies for sustaining, diversifying, and sharing the gene pool have shaped manioc diversity.

The abundance of the southern Pacific mollusk loco (Concholepas concholepas), among other conspicuous marine supplies, are often cited as critical resources behind the long-term cultural and demographic fluctuations of prehistoric hunter-gatherers in the coastal Atacama Desert. These societies inhabited one of the world's most productive marine environments flanked by one the world's driest deserts. Both of these environments have witnessed significant ecological variation since people first colonized them at the end of the Pleistocene (c. 13,000 cal yr BP). Here, we examine the relationship between the relative abundance of shellfish (a staple resource) along a 9,500-year sequence of archeological shell midden accumulations at Caleta (a small inlet or cove) Vitor, with past demographic trends (established via summed probability distributions of radiocarbon ages) and technological innovations together with paleoceanographic data on past primary productivity. We find that shellfish extraction varied considerably from one cultural period to the next in terms of the number of species and their abundance, with diversity increasing during periods of regionally decreased productivity. Such shifts in consumption patterns are considered community based management decisions, and for the most part they were synchronous with large and unusual regional demographic fluctuations experienced by prehistoric coastal societies in northern Chile. When taken together with their technological innovations, our data illustrates how these human groups tailored their socio-cultural patterns to what were often abrupt and prolonged environmental changes throughout the Holocene.