Memories of the sea. Human-animal relationships in images, tombs and preColumbian objects of Atacama

International audienceAlong the Atacama desert coast, in northern Chile, humans and marine animals had create multiples forms of relationships since the first peopling until today. At pre-Colombian times, for humans collectivities the beings of the sea were much more than a simple nutritional or economic source, they were also selected and included as an input in their imaginary, symbolic universe and political relationships. They construct an extremely dense and deep knowledge corpus about their behaviors, habits, distinctions, ethology and interspecies relationships. Regional archaeology had discovered a rich material culture that faithfully expresses these associations, painted and engraved rock art, funerary offerings and different kind of objects that uses refers to sea animals and humans links. In rock art marine species where carefully distinguished by their ethological and physiognomic traits, but also depicted is hunting scenes with rafts, harpoon lines and seafarers. In the engraved and painted images it is possible to recognize sharks, sea lions, squids, swordfishes, porpoises, turtles, dauphins and whales. Miniatures figurines of the same species had been identified over metal, bone and stone supports. Archaeological excavations in tombs had shown the regular presence of sea animals as part of the mortuary arrangement and offerings to the deaths, especially swords of swordfish, ornament and pendant made of turtle shells, whale ribs and dauphin skulls red colored. Finally, they had incorporated and employed bones, tendons, grease, skins and teeth animals as constituent elements of their technology, as in their hunting and fishing devices, rafts, residences and clothing. In summary, material culture had serve to humans as a relational strategy to create links with sea animals, and today to us it constitutes an extremely rich memory database about their pre-Colombian relationships