…a loincloth. Then there was the tattooing of the legs at eight years of age. Young people reaching puberty underwent the important rites of initiation into adulthood. According to chronicles…
Art
…gradually, free from external influences. The oldest of these platforms feature large walls composed of enormous blocks of lava fitted together with incredible precision. The first moais also date to…
Sea lion skin rafts
…The sea lion skin raft appeared in Northern Chile in the first millennium of the Common Era (0–1000 CE). This watercraft consisted of two inflated sea lion skins…
Economy
…The Tehuelche’s main prey was guanaco, and the people prized not only the meat but also the skins, which they used to make clothing, blankets, dwellings and other basic…
The pictographs of Tambillo
…The Tambillo pictographs are found on the walls of eight small rock shelters distributed along some 300 meters of the narrow, dry bed of the upper Quisma Ravine,…
Beliefs and funeral rites
…According to their myths, the Tehuelche descended from higher beings. Their supreme being was called Kooch, the all powerful ruler of the cosmos, creator of the sun and moon….
Culto y Funebria
…These southern inland hunters buried their dead in a variety of ways. The most common type of burial is that of the steppe peoples of historic times, who placed…
Settlement pattern
…third-order centers for local administration and countless fourth-order settlements based on agriculture and livestock production. The peasant class lived in modest dwellings with mud walls and straw roofs built upon…
Story of the Forbidden Otter and the Great Flood
…Narrated by José Tonko Wide (Kstákso) Puerto Edén, 1975 A long time ago, while his father….was out hunting otters and birds, a young man went out after him to…
The Sacrificer
…war. An alternate explanation is tied to the belief that the deceased watch over agricultural fields and ensure a bountiful harvest. Just as the farmers cut the heads of the…
Beliefs and funerary practices
…to the people. The people make ritual “payments” to these entities to ensure an abundant supply of grass for livestock, water for irrigation and for animal and human consumption, and…
History
…has determined that the area was first occupied around 8000 B.C. by hunting-gathering groups that made use of the ravines and salt flats. In the later pre-Hispanic period, between 900…
Kospi
…Kospi was admired by the Tehuelches for her beauty. One day, Karut (thunder, the Lord of the Mountains) kidnapped her and took her to the mountains, where he hid…
Beliefs and Funerary Practices
…The Diaguitas have celebrated Catholic religious celebrations since colonial times, as this part of the Norte Chico was one of the first to be evangelized in the early colonial…
Polynesian horticultural-fisher-gatherers
…classes and clans that often came into conflict with each other, even to the point of inter-communal war. While their way of life flourished for some time, the frequent disputes,…
Marine hunter-gatherers of the southern zone
…The Southern Zone was the setting for the development of a hunter-gatherer culture with a strong maritime emphasis that dates back as early as 8000 B.C.These groups not…
Settlement pattern
…They located their residential camps and semi-permanent villages along the tributary ravines and upper reaches of the region’s river valleys, always close to water courses and in sheltered areas…
The petroglyphs of Tamentica
…range of geometric figures including borders, crosses, spirals, circles, wavy and zigzag parallel lines, and other shapes. Notable among the petroglyphs are human figures with appendagesprotruding from their disproportionately large…
Economía
…These groups were farmers and herders who lived in the mountains, taking advantage of the mountain pastures as forage for their llama herds. They grew maize in fields watered…
Hunters of the Megafauna
…The Americas were first populated near the end of the Pleistocene, when environmental conditions were completely different from those presently in force, as the continent was in a…
Polynesian horticultural-fisher-gatherers
…and clans that often came into conflict with each other, even to the point of inter-communal war. While their way of life flourished for some time, the frequent disputes, coupled…
Agriculturalists
…led to the development of a way of life that centered on these agricultural processes. Agriculturalist societies are characterized by their control over plant reproduction and growth, which also necessitated…
Environment and Geography
…Valley. The zone of Huasco Alto is a foothills region with a semi-arid climate. Geographically it features steep, narrow valleys and high mountain peaks. The valley is watered by the…
Patrón de Asentamiento
…up, full of sea shells from their food waste. In some locations they dug out shallow pits in these middens to build their shelters, making walls from the shells. In…