From herders to wage laborers and back again: engaging with capitalism in the Atacama Puna region of northern Chile

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, indigenous Atacameo society transited from an agro-pastoralist to a more diversified capitalist-based economy due to a growing mining industry in northern Chile. The puna herders engaged in the new capitalist order as wage laborers in sulfur mines and llareta (Azorella compacta) exploitation companies. In this article we show how indigenous knowledge acted as cultural capital that enabled the herders to work as laborers. This operation led to horizontal treatment among the different agents in the taskscape that those "herder-laborers" inhabited, including those incorporated by industrial capitalism.FONDECYT 112008

South American mummy trafficking Captain Duniam's nineteenth-century worldwide enterprises

Nineteenth-century fascination for the exhibition of mummies from around the world promoted the trafficking of cultural objects from remote places including, as reviewed here, the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. While well-funded and organized expeditions travelled the world seeking this material, independent sailors and traders also returned to Europe and beyond with items of exotica for sale. The Macleay Museum, at the University of Sydney, has the well-preserved remains of a human female in its collection, with no record of its provenance. The remains may correspond to two Peruvian mummies brought to Australia by Captain George Duniam in 1851. Besides mummies, his worldwide enterprises included the trafficking of slaves from Polynesia to the coast of South America, and camelids out of Peru - practices still current in the twenty-first century

The Contemporary Past of San Pedro de Atacama, Northern Chile: Public Archaeology?

Artículo de publicación ISIHistorically, the relationships between archaeologist and the indigenous communities in San Pedro Atacama (northern Chile) have been complex and conflicting. The study of the contemporary past in this oasis situates us fully in the present, in a horizontal timeframe that gives us the chance to try a new approach to archaeology, letting our practice be guided in a critical, reflexive manner and acknowledging that it is immersed in a fabric of social and political relations. In this article, we examine our archaeological practice as we embark on the study of capitalist expansion in San Pedro de Atacama