Gente, tierra, agua y cultivos: los primeros paisajes agrarios del hoy noroeste argentino

Abstract

In this article we bring together knowledge concerning pre-Hispanic agriculture resulting from the work of different research groups pursuing various lines of evidence in different areas. We reflect on the formation of the first agricultural landscapes in northwest Argentina, specifically on the way in which the relations between people, crops, water and land were organized in a particular spatiality during the period that has been defined as “Formative”. Part of this reflection led us to revise some assumptions about plant production in the Formative period, trying to avoid traditional schemes that translate the preHispanic history into evolutionary stages, each of them conceived as internally homogeneous and organized under a typological perspective. As a result of recent research, with the contribution of new methodological and theoretical approaches, we think of agriculture in a broader sense than those assumed by previous research in the region, conceiving it as a way of doing and being in a particular ambit with their social forms of appropriations. This leads us to consider the continuities, breaks, overlaps and the multiples ways of dwelling within the productive landscapes in regional agrarian history.