Avaliação: El manejo del agua en los Andes : pasado, presente y futuro – Water, minerals, wak’as, lives and landscapes: long-term political ecology in the high-altitude Atacama

In the past and present, water, minerals, people, and politics have been entangled in the Atacama region of northern Chile, a hyperarid, mineralogically rich landscape that first became incorporated into a larger political economy with its conquest by the Inka in the early 15th century. We explore this history and these relations through a discussion of water management, farming and herding, mining, society and politics (involving both human and non-human beings) in late prehispanic times in the Upper Loa region of northern Chile, and compare this context to that of modern Indigenous communities in Atacama. Though this comparison, we begin to consider the potential but also the complexities of applying the past to the present and the future.

• water management
• applied archaeology
• Atacama