ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationships between the content manifested in the rock art forms and modes of subsistence as a way of revealing the ideological processes and social distinctions of the past. These relationships are especially pronounced in the Atacama Desert highlands, where in association with the first pastoralist communities we have detected the coexistence of two rock art styles, Confluencia style and Taira Tuln style, each with its own formal content, one alluding to wild camelids and armed hunters, the other to domesticated camelids. Ideology is a type of representation, a flawed conception of the true nature of the relationships people establish in the productive process. As we know, all ideology operates through social and economic reproduction. Rock art is an archaeological fact whose shapes and distribution express an aspect of a community's collective imagination or an author's awareness of a community's cultural expectations and frustrations.
