The Ancestors of Calchaquí: A View of the Zavaleta Collection

Abstract

In the Santa María Valley, there is a considerable imbalance between the knowledge available about the societies immediately preceding the Spanish conquest—those peoples to whom a name has even been attributed, the “Calchaquíes”—and the earlier village societies. We believe that current archaeological knowledge of the societies of Northwestern Argentina has been affected, in general, by the collection of archaeological objects by collectors between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the negative effects of this process have been difficult to remedy. One of them is the limited knowledge of the material culture of the first millennium CE in this valley and in the southern Calchaquí Valley.

This paper considers a series of objects from the northern Santa María Valley: the collection that Manuel Zavaleta sold to the Field Museum in Chicago. The record of around one hundred of these pieces suggests that local populations in the valley had access to a stylistic universe partially shared with the populations of the Western Forests, located to the east, and of the Calchaquí Valley. This stylistic universe was expressed in their own manufactured objects, and this fact has not yet been adequately investigated.

Although the results are still preliminary, our aim is to offer elements concerning the distribution of representations during the first millennium CE and to contribute to the discussion of models of symbolic legitimation in the territory of the Santa María Valley and its surroundings.