Representations and historicities of Pampa del Tamarugal: relational descriptions of a persistent landscape (Tarapaca, Northern Chile)

This research aims at assembling archeological, ethnographic and ethnohistoric registers in harmony with the Andean explanations on the Atacama desert landscapes. As reference, it takes Iluga Tumulus archeological site that has been used until recently in Pampa del Tamarugal. In this way, we aim at enhancing and unravelling the apparent contradiction among the attributes of aridity and fertility, of dehumanised desert and live landscape that simultaneously characterise this place. Precisely this tensions our own social and cultural, critical theory, thus obliging us to explore appropriate concepts that allows our understanding of local spatialities and multiple temporalities, in a permanent readjustment when incorporating dominions and frequently invisibilised and/or subalternised from its exteriority. This heterogeneity and variability of worlds are exposed from three relational axes. Firstly, we archaeologically give an account of the Iluga Tumulos overlapping of technological practices and symbolic conventions (ceremonial heaps, livestock farming and agriculture) that challenge the imaginaries of sociality and relationality of our own analytical equipment. Secondly, we ethnohistorically contextualise the attributes of dryness and roughness of an inhospitable desert in the master narratives from late colonial time until the War of the Pacific and the Chileanisation feats. Thirdly, we ethnographically confront the environmental wisdom and the creativity proper to the Andean populations. This is done considering the deterioration of the forestry and agriculture environments on the Pampas, and reflecting on the paradoxes and challenges in the contemporary Andean communities. We propose this exercise with the purpose of contributing to collective projects able to transcend the historical fractures, the identity essentialisms and the bio-political conflicts that impose today's neoliberal order on this territory and its populations