A pastoral landscape process: characterizing place and movement

Abstract

Pastoralists recognize the environment through their everyday movements, a process which produces cultural inscriptions in the landscape and transforms places and paths into landmarks of spatial prerogatives and memories. The objective of this article is to consider some aspects related to the mobility strategies of a pastoralist group in the Santa María Valley of northwest Argentina. Using an ethnoarchaeological approach, we investigate how the persistence of pastoral life constructed a living landscape full of meaning and identity. We have also worked with the concepts of place and movement in order to demonstrate how this process is fluid and constantly internalized by the classification of the people.

Keywords
Pastoralism; Landscape; Mobility; Northwest Argentina; Ethnoarchaeology