Este trabajo busca conocer las estrategias tecnológicas, los rangos de acción y la conectividad en las estrategias humanas de ambientes marginales. Se discute, para el caso del sur de Mendoza, el modelo clásico de trashumancia cazadora recolectora entre tierras bajas y altas. El estudio se centra específicamente en El Payén y en el uso de la obsidiana andina Laguna del Maule. En El Payén, esta obsidiana ocupa el primer lugar entre las variedades conocidas y su uso se vinculó a circuitos de movilidad estacional que involucraban tierras bajas y altas. La obsidiana Laguna del Maule posee dos subtipos geoquímicos, el Subtipo 1 registrado en cordillera, y el Subtipo 2 localizado en depósitos fluviales distales. En este trabajo modelamos las estrategias de interacción de tierras altas con tierras bajas, enfocándonos en modelos propuestos para La Payunia, que ponen énfasis en la tecnología lítica y se articulan con análisis geoquímicos y geoarqueológicos. Los resultados sostienen que las poblaciones de El Payén obtenían este recurso mediante distintas estrategias tecnológicas: un aprovisionamiento serial del Subtipo 2, con circuitos de movilidad centrados en tierras bajas; diferente al Subtipo 1 de aprovisionamiento cíclico, que habría involucrado la interacción entre tierras altas y tierras bajas.

This article contributes to migration and livelihood scholarship by reflecting on global and political dimensions of livelihoods and experiences of illegalisation in Central America. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research with Nicaraguan families and their migrant family members in Costa Rica, the article adopts a translocal livelihood perspective and uses the notion of everyday politics to explore migrants’ mobility practices and nuance the role and reach of illegalisation in relatively accessible South–South migration. In conclusion, the article reinvigorates the notion of ‘everyday politics of mobility’ to incorporate the multi-sitedness, multi-dimensionality and multi-directionality of translocalising livelihoods, offering a lens for future comparison of illegalisation within and beyond the so-called Global South.

This study uses isotope and microbotanical data from the analysis of teeth and dental calculus to investigate camelid diet and foddering practices at Quilcapampa (AD 835–900). By providing taxonomically specific evidence of foods consumed, botanical data from dental calculus complement the more general impressions of photosynthetic pathways obtained through isotopic analysis. Results suggest that the camelid diet incorporated maize (Zea mays), algarrobo (Prosopis sp.), potato chuño (Solanum sp.), and other resources. The life-history profile of one camelid (Individual 3) reveals dietary change from mainly C3 plants to more C4 plant contributions as the animal aged. This pattern is supported by carbonate isotope results indicating that this individual spent its youth in the mid-valley ecozone before becoming more mobile later in life. As this life-history example shows, isotopic and microbotanical analyses are complementary approaches, clarifying a pattern of seasonal transhumance that linked the lives of humans and animals along the Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000) caravan networks that crisscrossed the central Andes.

Economic directness is a new model of socioeconomic organization for the Paracas culture (800–200 BC) in southern Peru, with wider implications for economic theory of the prehispanic Andean past. Using an archaeoeconomic approach to analyze settlement patterns, obsidian artifacts, malacological material, and camelid skeletal remains, this study reconstructs the Paracas economy by using primary archaeological data from the northern Nasca Drainage. Its results force reconsideration of existing socioeconomic models for the ancient Andes such as verticality, circuit mobility, llama caravan mobility, transhumance, and market concepts. Whereas components typical of these models are often absent in the case of the Paracas economy, our new proposal of economic directness integrates their relevant aspects. Economic directness is defined essentially by direct access to important resources from diverse ecological tiers, direct and down-the-line exchanges, reduced transaction costs, llama caravan transport, unbalanced commodity flows across the western Andes, and forces of supply and demand with major consumption on the coast. These features formed under conditions of population growth, generating a continuous and dense settlement pattern from the Pacific coast to the highland puna zone.

The neutral model of stone procurement developed by Brantingham (2003, 2006) provides a formal means to investigate the formation of lithic discard patterning under changing forager mobility conditions. This study modifies Brantingham's (2006) Lévy walk model to examine the influence of discard probability on the spatial distribution of raw material abundance. The model outcome shows that forager movement and tool discard probability have similar effects on the simulated patterns of raw material transport, so it is difficult—if not impossible—to differentiate the respective influence of the two factors from distance to source distributions alone. This finding of equifinality complicates the task of interpretating hominin mobility from archaeological distance to source data, particularly in settings such as the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition, which is marked by an important reorganization in hominin lithic technology that may have affected stone tool discard probability.

A partir del análisis de la configuración de los paisajes arqueológicos en el bosque montano de las yungas tucumanas, entre 400 aC y 1500 dC, se discuten los cambios y continuidades en la práctica y las condiciones en las cuales estos se reprodujeron. Como resultado de las investigaciones arqueológicas llevadas a cabo en Anfama desde el año 2014, se identificaron 14 asentamientos residenciales de distinta escala, los cuales fueron mapeados, sondeados, fechados y, algunos de ellos, excavados. El análisis cronológico, realizado en base a contextos materiales y a 15 dataciones radiocarbónicas, permite proponer cuatro bloques temporales que se diferencian en las modalidades de construir y habitar los espacios domésticos y en la utilización de materias primas a través de determinadas tecnologías. Se discute cómo las trazas materiales de la práctica social traslapan a dicha segmentación cronométrica, de la misma manera en que eventos constructivos, habitacionales y depositacionales se superponen en determinados lugares. Finalmente, se reconocen tendencias de larga duración que giran en torno a la dispersión poblacional como atributo que define a los paisajes y a las lógicas sociales que se sostuvieron en el área de estudio por casi dos milenios.

We present stable isotope and osteological data from human remains at Paloma, Chilca I, La Yerba III, and Morro I that offer new evidence for diet, lifestyle, and habitual mobility in the first villages that proliferated along the arid Pacific coast of South America (ca. 6000 cal BP). The data not only reaffirm the dietary primacy of marine protein for this period but also show evidence at Paloma of direct access interactions between the coast and highlands, as well as habitual mobility in some parts of society. By locating themselves at the confluence of diverse coastal and terrestrial habitats, the inhabitants of these early villages were able to broaden their use of resources through rounds of seasonal mobility, while simultaneously increasing residential sedentism. Yet they paid little substantial health penalty for their settled lifestyles, as reflected in their osteological markers of stature and stress, compared with their agriculturalist successors even up to five millennia later. Contrasting data for the north coast of Chile indicate locally contingent differences. Considering these data in a wider chronological context contributes to understanding how increasing sedentism and population density laid the foundations here for the emergence of Late Preceramic social complexity.

The early colonial period witnessed new scales of connectivity and unprecedented projects of resource extraction across the Spanish Americas. Yet such transformations also drew heavily on preexisting Indigenous landscapes, technologies, and institutions. Drawing together recent discussions in archaeology and geography about mobility and resource materialities, this article takes the early colonial route as a central object of investigation and contributes to new emerging interpretive frameworks that make sense of Spanish colonialism in the Americas as a variable, large-scale, and materially constituted process. Using three case studies—the ruta de Colón on the island of Hispaniola, the routes connecting the southeastern Caribbean islands with mainland South America, and the ruta de la plata in the south-central Andes—we develop a comparative archaeological analysis that reveals divergent trajectories of persistence, appropriation, and erasure in the region's routes and regimes of extraction and mobility during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The Promontory caves (Utah) and Franktown Cave (Colorado) contain high-fidelity records of short-term occupations by groups with material culture connections to the Subarctic/Northern Plains. This research uses Promontory and Franktown bison dung, hair, hide, and bone collagen to establish local baseline carbon isotopic variability and identify leather from a distant source. The ankle wrap of one Promontory Cave 1 moccasin had a δ13C value that indicates a substantial C4 component to the animal's diet, unlike the C3 diets inferred from 171 other Promontory and northern Utah bison samples. We draw on a unique combination of multitissue isotopic analysis, carbon isoscapes, ancient DNA (species and sex identification), tissue turnover rates, archaeological contexts, and bison ecology to show that the high δ13C value was not likely a result of local plant consumption, bison mobility, or trade. Instead, the bison hide was likely acquired via long-distance travel to/from an area of abundant C4 grasses far to the south or east. Expansive landscape knowledge gained through long-distance associations would have allowed Promontory caves inhabitants to make well-informed decisions about directions and routes of movement for a territorial shift, which seems to have occurred in the late thirteenth century.

En este trabajo se discute la movilidad y uso del espacio terrestre por parte de los grupos cazadores-recolectores costeros que habitaron la Bahía Moat, en la costa sureste de Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Para ello, se analizan las pautas de explotación del guanaco (Lama guanicoe), único animal terrestre que tuvo un rol significativo para la subsistencia y requirió planificación en términos logísticos para su aprovechamiento. Los conjuntos estudiados corresponden al Holoceno tardío y los restos óseos se analizan en función de distintos modelos y marcos de referencia que evalúan las modalidades de búsqueda, transporte y procesamiento de camélidos. Los resultados alcanzados permiten plantear que la organización espacial de las prácticas de subsistencia pudo haberse desarrollado a partir de un alto dinamismo entre la costa y el interior. El elevado consumo de guanacos, junto con los patrones de selección y transporte, sugiere que las partidas de caza hacia el interior y las zonas ecológicas adyacentes al litoral pudieron haber estado integradas logísticamente dentro de un sistema de movilidad residencial localizado geográficamente en la costa.

In the last few decades, the discovery of large ditched enclosures in Iberia has revealed the diversity and complexity of deposition and manipulation of human bone remains. Alongside traditional ritual burials (mainly megalithic tombs and hypogea), fragmented and scattered human bones mixed with other kinds of material culture began to appear in many features. This is the case for Ditch 5 at Marroquíes, which offers an excellent opportunity to explore this ritual behaviour. Based on a multi-proxy approach, three main conclusions can be drawn: 1) the skeletal elements present show deliberate selection of particular categories of bones; 2) depositional episodes included the remains of people who died at different points in time and were subject to different taphonomic processes, and 3) mobility patterns indicate that all individuals, with one possible exception, were local. The movement and manipulations of body parts may reflect the active role of people after death as social and symbolic elements that retain agency and capacity for action.

Hunter-gatherer societies held sway in midwestern North America for at least 11,000 years. Those at the end of this period were more complex and less mobile, and they supported larger populations than those at the beginning, but there are relatively few general conceptions as to when and how this took place. Here we examine the fit of gradual, one-way social change as it relates to the size and shape of lithic supply zones for Upper Mercer and Flint Ridge flint as well as the inflow of exotic materials. Our results show no singular cline either in the size of successive lithic supply zones or in the inflow of exotic materials. Hunter-gatherer societies can make remarkable behavioral changes through time and not necessarily in any consistent (unilineal) direction. Such differences impose more contingency—and less directionality—into particular historical sequences.

Diverse theoretical perspectives suggest that place plays an important role in human behavior. One recent perspective proposes that habitual and recursive use of places among humans may be an emergent property of obligate tool use by our species. In this view, the costs of tool use are reduced by preferential occupation of previously occupied places where cultural materials have been discarded. Here we use the model to generate five predictions for ethnographic mobility patterns. We then test the predictions against observations made during one month of coresidence with a residentially mobile Dukha family in the Mongolian Taiga. We show that (1) there is a strong tendency to occupy previously used camps, (2) previously deposited materials are habitually recycled, (3) reoccupation of places transcends kinship, (4) occupational hiatuses can span decades or longer, and (5) the distribution of occupation intensity among camps is highly skewed such that most camps are not intensively reoccupied whereas a few camps experience extremely high reoccupation intensity. These findings complement previous archaeological findings and support the conclusion that the constructed dimensions of human habitats exert a strong influence on mobility patterns in mobile societies.