The archaeological landscape of Late Prehispanic mixed foraging and cultivation economy (Sierras of Córdoba, Argentina)

•A model of Sierras of Córdoba Late Prehispanic Period landscape use is proposed.•The dependence of crops and the sedentary way of life are now open to question.•Farming was a fluctuating component in a mobile mixed foraging and cultivation economy.

A short review of current data regarding the landscape use in the Sierras of Córdoba Late Prehispanic Period (ca. 1500–300 BP) is presented in this article. Resulting expectation about residential mobility and subsistence are analyzed in light of new evidence and interpretative framework. The lack of substantial middens, few evidences of year-round residence and the low investment in farming fields support the inadequacies of the assumption that the agriculture led to the sudden dependence of crops and to the sedentary way of life in pit-house villages. Other archaeological indicators as the intensity of landscape use, the taxonomic richness of food residues, the abundance of projectile point-types and isotopic evidence reinforce these arguments. However, the evidence suggests that the Late Prehispanic peoples showed flexible subsistence and mobility patterns as one of their defining traits, where nuclear families moved around the landscape to take advantage of both agricultural and wild resources as available. Thus, farming was a fluctuating component in a mixed foraging and cultivation economy where wild animals and plants were intensively exploited through seasonal co-residential group fission–fusion mechanisms that follow the pre-existing Middle Holocene forager lifeways. Nevertheless, many variables can affect this equation, including regional population densities, social boundaries or annual variation in foraging opportunities and a mosaic of strategies combination is also predicted.