…have referred to the same ethnic group. Nonetheless, it seems that the term ‘Chango’ generally refers not to a specific people, but to all those who practiced this maritime way…
Settlement pattern
…itself was covered with leaves, skins and bark to keep out the wind. As covering materials were not easily obtained, the people took them along in the dalca when they…
Environment and Location
…Altiplano of Bolivia. The region has a desert climate, with almost no rainfall and extreme day-night temperature variation. Water is present in the meadows and grazing lands that border rivers…
Culto y Funebria
These groups employed a number of different techniques to bury their dead, and frequently used middens or rocky outcrops as burial sites. Bodies were sometimes laid out straight…
Beliefs and funeral rites
…vessels and stone pipes. Males generally had tembetás (lip ornaments). In the cemeteries of the Elqui and Limarí valleys it was common to find piles of gravel on the bodies…
Economy
In ancient times, the people of Rapa Nui subsisted by growing several varieties of plantain, squash, tubers and sugar cane, and complemented their diet with fishing, hunting and…
Aymara
…war of sound, with residents dividing up into the “upper” and “lower” town groups, which compete to see who will be the best, the loudest and the most long-winded singer….
Plain weave
…Plain weave is a simpler and more widely-used technique for making cloth. It involves alternately lifting the odd and even warp threads for each successive weft shot to create…
Farmers and herders with central organization
…in the arid north and the Inka expansion into northern Chile. In both cases, the way of life revolved around a centralized authority, who organized the economy into a macro-regional…
Kai Kai y Treng Treng
…the mountaintops. Just when they could ascend no more, they heard a voice coming from deep within the earth, calling treng, treng, treng. It was the divine serpent come to…
The Story of the Toads
…story goes. Some toads who were frozen in their canoe were steering their vessel, almost dead with cold, goes the story. And the toads’ canoe was destroyed, And when they…
Marine hunters, fishers and gatherers
…The invention of fish hooks and then seagoing vessels by some early marine hunter-gatherer groups was a turning point that transformed their way of life, transforming fishing into…
Art
The Pica people are perhaps most well known for their geoglyphs, but they also produced notable examples of rock art, leaving behind engraved boulders (petroglyphs) at many sites….
Economy
…irrigation works and farming terraces to grow maize and quinoa, taking advantage of the water that flowed down their ravines from the high mountains after the summer rains. They also…
Social organization
…lived in small family bands that enabled them to move around easily, as their hunting way of life required, with a division of labor based only on age and sex….
Economy
…skin of their prey to make a variety of implements and clothing. To complement their diet, they probably gathered fruit from the surrounding forests and water plants from nearby lakes….
Settlement pattern
…roads running between them. This village was built at the peak of the Pica culture, and was probably the “headquarters” of this society. Caserones is another major site, also located…
Environment and Location
…land from the Pacific coast all the way to the Andean foothills. Between the forest and the eternal snows of the high Andes are forests of Araucaria trees, a coniferous…
Rapa Nui
…traditions, war and death. The riu were very important songs that were performed with deep feeling, almost like free-form laments. These included funerary songs, songs to bring rain, ‘royal’ songs…
Marine hunter-gatherers
…At almost the same time that the terrestrial hunter-gatherer way of life emerged inland, along Chile’s extensive coastline other groups relied on the coastal environment as their main…
Settlement pattern
…and white wool is placed on top to ward off evil. Atacameño settlement patterns also include complex agricultural terraces and irrigation canals, which are the foundation of their agricultural system….
History
…early period gave way to subsequent stages marked by key events—the establishment of trade routes to and from the Tiwanaku Empire, and incorporation into the Inka Empire. The caravan trade…
Horticulturalist-pastoralists
…shaped a way of life in which tending sown fields and livestock herds accelerated the process of sedentarism itself. In turn, the keeping of camelids—which in addition to being a…