ABSTRACT
Tropical Andean weather patterns and close altitudinal juxtaposition of environmental zones led the first human settlers to practice seasonal transhumance, which, in the Archaic period, transformed into a pattern of controlled herding, movements of plants and animals to new habitats, and, eventually, to agropastoralism social systems. Scattered zones of productivity led early to the movement of goods on human and camelid backs along what later became well-established caravan routes. The coincidence of transhumance, pastoralism, archipelagos of production, and their linkage by caravans, may have begun first, and been first demonstrated archaeologically in Peru, but caravanning became even more pronounced in the drier parts of northern Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina – the zone often referred to as the south-central Andes. The study of the routes was initiated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by European geographers and anthropologists, and then by anthropologists trained in, or heavily influenced by, environmentally conscious schools of thought. From the 1970s onward, anthropologists and archaeologists in Chile have been especially prominent in the study of caravans and their routes, which have persisted into modern times, using llamas, equids, and even motor vehicles. The most efficient use of the many but scattered Andean resources still involves movements of the people themselves or transportation of the goods by caravanning participants in the system, along many of the same prehispanic routes between oases and settlements, regardless of means of transport.
