ABSTRACT
Long-term evolutionary narratives on South Andean pre-Columbian history have stressed lineal processes of complexity intensification, defined by big changes on subsistence strategies, from small and egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups to complex multi-communitarian chiefdoms. Several social groupings, as households, villages, communities, and cultures, were assumed as functionally integrated systems, with motionless essences and seamless structures. In this contribution, household concept is revised from assemblage framework in order to understand how different entities are joint in dynamic fluxes and to include materials as real actors of social relationships. I present new researches on the Formative-period settlements from the valleys and eastern slopes of Northwestern Argentina addressing the material dynamics of houses and the constitution of collectives that allowed the formation, growth, and dissolution of particular heterogeneous assemblages: early villages.
