Towards a Human Ecology for the Middle Holocene in the Southern Puna

Human groups share their habitat with a multitude of life forms and, like them, must develop behaviors that enable long-term use of the environment, as well as the interaction between species and with other groups. The environmental basic conditions are largely shaped by natural factors, such as climate, geomorphology, soil properties and species diversity. However, humans change these basic conditions with the development of livelihood strategies, technological, organizational forms, corporate resolutions, etc. The mid-Holocene, the period from ca. 8200 to ca. 3700 BP, is a unique moment to study the interaction between human groups and their habitats. Against the backdrop of directional climate change and its environmental consequences, the Middle Holocene human groups generated a series of innovations and strategies over time that changed the social settings and set the stage for later developments. This paper presents a model of environmental fragmentation to account for the social and cultural strategies developed by hunter-gatherers of the period, exemplified with the changes in the use of animal resources at the regional level in the Puna de Atacama of Chile and Argentina.