Scales of analysis in geoarcheology: application in a Valley from northwest Argentina

Abstract

Geoarchaeological studies constitute a great contribution compared to other approaches for the understanding of past human societies. This is because the complexity that these sorts of studies reach in the management of multiple lines of evidence. The construction of a geoarchaeological model of a region implies the management of various temporal and spatial scales, which gives richness to the interpretations and a coevolutionary perspective of the cultural and natural variables, often interpreted as opposite and antagonistic. The objective of this work is to show how geoarchaeology can constitute a tool for an agile approach to the knowledge of the societies of the past, the reconstruction of the landscape, the paleoenvironments of past times, and the material culture through various spatio-temporal scales analyses. These scales can be structured to generate an integrated and articulated whole to produce reliable inferences of processes that are crisscrossed in a space-time continuum. Finally, the process is illustrated with the results obtained in the last decades of work in the Tafí Valley (Tucumán, Argentina), including examples of articulation between the regional scale, intermediate scale and detail scale.