Carlos Raúl Belotti Lopez De Medina

Human-animal interactions have shaped cultural practices over millennia. The South-Central Andes’a distinct cultural area characterized by wide environmental diversity, significant climate variability, and extensive anthropogenic modification’ enables the empirical examination of these relationships over the long-term, particularly in regards to the domestication of camelids (llamas) and the emergence of pastoral economies and caravan trade.
Andean scholarship has long established the general links between environmental variation and evolution of subsistence strategies and broader economic patterns. Yet the lack of exhaustive fine-grained syntheses of reported data and an overreliance on small samples of case studies to draw general patterns obscures the richness of pre-Columbian human-animal interaction and their impact on sociocultural developments. This project aims at testing current hypotheses on long-term development of human-faunal interaction and its correlation with environmental and social change over the last thirteen thousand years. Drawing on quantitative methods and spatial analysis, the project will chart changes and continuities since the terminal Pleistocene / early Holocene in the region. The project’s main outcome will be an integrative dataset that will provide a new baseline for further zooarchaeological research in the Andes, while offering a source for comparative human-animal interaction research worldwide.